“Dobson and Bauer and Land are shadows of their once-powerful selves. They have little power anymore to mobilize for any particular candidate”– David Kuo
I’ll stick to Dobson, since I think he’s more powerful than any Christian Right leader to come before. Let’s examine David’s evidence: the political arm of the Family Research Council–a group that Dobson took the lead in founding in the ’80s and in which he still exerts great control–partners with Dobson’s own Focus on the Family Action to throw a Values Voter soiree in a political season in which the GOP ain’t exactly ascendant. Nonetheless, 2,000 activists pay their own way to get there. Plus, every Republican candidate shows up–and, to varying degrees, puckers up. A few hundred members of the media swing by. And that’s supposed to be the evidence that Dobson doesn’t matter?
David rightly observes that Dobson’s national empire isn’t the efficient top-down corporation that Christian Coalition was circa 1994. Still, Focus on the Family’s state-based groups–its family policy councils, the closest thing Focus has to affiliates–were responsible for recruiting much of the crowd at Values Voter Summit ’07. And they’ve proven themselves effective in other ways. They led most of the two-dozen successful drives to ban gay unions by amending state constitutions, for example. The Ohio family policy council’s push to amend the constitution there in ’04 may have handed George W. Bush his second term. Not exactly small potatoes.
For me, then, the issue is less that the Christian Right old guard has lost its muscle and more that the GOP has failed to capitalize on it. The media all agree that that’s the major problem ailing Giuliani, Romney, and Thompson, right? Such are the risks for a Republican Party in which George W. Bush is no longer running for president.