Sept. 7, 2008 | COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Following their successful reenergizing of the Republican base at the convention in St. Paul, Minn., this week, Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin took their show on the road.
Outside a jet hangar in Colorado Springs Saturday, their two campaign planes, one emblazoned with "McCain for President" and the other with "McCain-Palin," gleamed in the midday sun, prominently on display to the crowd of 10,000 supporters who gathered to see, hear and rally behind the newly minted ticket.
McCain and Palin couldn’t have picked a more favorable place to continue their campaign. Colorado Springs, the state’s second largest city, is home to the Air Force Academy, a military base and more than 80 evangelical churches and ministries, including James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. In other words, it’s McCain-Palin country.
Prior to picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain had failed to excite the nation’s conservatives. Colorado was no exception. On Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, he lost the state’s closed GOP caucus to Mitt Romney 60 to 18 percent. That same day, Focus on the Family leader James Dobson refused to endorse McCain, blasting him in a statement that Laura Ingraham read aloud on her radio show: "I am convinced Sen. McCain is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are."Shortly after McCain chose Palin as his running mate, Dobson said her addition to the ticket made him ready to pull the lever for McCain. Yet in Colorado Springs, neither McCain nor Palin acknowledged the evangelical voters. The themes of the brief dual appearance, which lasted less than half an hour, were patriotism, the military and the need to win Colorado, with a few sprinkles about the troubled economy. "There’s no better place than Colorado Springs for me to tell you this," said McCain. "We are winning in Iraq." There wasn’t a single reference to the social conservatives’ agenda, or their massive presence in this city of 400,000. While McCain talked about Iraq, the GOP’s fundamentalist base had to be content with a dog whistle: He had picked one of their own as his running mate and brought her to a holy city of the religious right within 48 hours of accepting the nomination.
How important is the evangelical vote to McCain-Palin? Consider 2004. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals were George W. Bush’s largest demographic group, accounting for 35 percent of his total vote. Newsweek reports there are now 60 million white evangelicals in America. Gov. Palin shares their values, and according to media interviews and reports, they are flocking in droves to the McCain/Palin ticket…
It is simply not possible that the published sequence of events is true – John McCain’s staff bumbling the vetting process, defying Karl Rove’s advice to pick Romney, Dobson listening to Palin and changing his mind. This scenario was planned in great detail, in part to hide Karl Rove’s involvement. It is simply not possible that Karl Rove wasn’t involved in creating and brokering this whole show – his fingerprints are unmistakable.
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