Analysts say McCain wooing religious right

LYNCHBURG, Va. -- When he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, Senator John McCain denounced religious right leader Jerry Falwell as an ''evil" force whose message of ''intolerance" hurt the GOP and America.

Today, McCain, who is all but officially on the presidential campaign trail, will deliver the commencement address at Falwell's evangelical Christian college. Though he's simply speaking to Liberty University graduates and their parents, the Arizona Republican's visit to the Lynchburg, Va., college is nonetheless freighted with broader political symbolism.

By accepting the invitation and showing newfound respect for Falwell, political analysts say, McCain is courting religious right voters with the goal of accomplishing in 2008 what he couldn't in 2000: win the Republican nomination for president. McCain, they say, apparently has calculated that improving his relations with one of the Republicans' core constituencies is worth the risk of damaging his contrarian image, which made him popular among independents.

''He's obviously going down to kiss [Falwell's] ring," said Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia.

Officially, both sides are denying that McCain's trip to Liberty University has any such overtones. John Weaver, a consultant to Straight Talk America, McCain's political action committee, said ''there is no strategy" behind the appearance and that McCain is simply happy to ''address the students and parents on this important day in their lives."

And in a New York Times opinion article published on Sunday, Falwell wrote that he simply wanted his students to learn from McCain. Inviting the senator to campus, he said, was neither an endorsement nor ''an effort to repair a relationship damaged during the 2000 Republican primary."

But most political observers see the commencement speech as a major fence-mending exercise between the front-runner for the 2008 Republican nomination and the aging televangelist.

The bad blood between McCain and Falwell dates to a speech the senator gave in February 2000, when the GOP presidential primary field had essentially narrowed to McCain and then-Texas Governor George W. Bush.

Earlier in that campaign, McCain had sought the support of social conservatives. He even won the endorsement of Gary Bauer, a prominent conservative Christian who later said McCain had promised that he would appoint antiabortion rights judges -- a pledge Bush refused to give, Bauer said.

But then came the now-infamous South Carolina primary, in which Bush supporters reportedly spread salacious rumors about McCain in phone calls and e-mail messages. One such rumor accused McCain of fathering illegitimate children.

McCain blamed religious right leaders for the smear campaign. He went to Virginia Beach, Va., home of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, and gave a speech attacking Robertson and Falwell by name, calling them ''agents of intolerance" who were corrupting both religion and politics.

Bush defeated McCain in that primary, marked as a turning point in the 2000 GOP campaign.

In fact, political scholars say, there was little evidence that Falwell was involved in the South Carolina smear campaign. But they say that by broadly attacking the religious right's leadership, McCain was gambling that he could amplify his support among independents and moderates alienated by their political style.

''While you could make a good case that Robertson was very involved in the 2000 campaign, Falwell really wasn't," said John Green, a University of Akron political science professor. ''But if you're trying to make a broader point about not being associated with a group of people, then listing to their leaders is a good way to do it."

Ultimately, Green said, McCain's Virginia Beach speech was probably a strategic error because it galvanized Christian conservatives to vote against him in the remaining primaries, essentially handing Bush the nomination. So as McCain tries again to become the GOP presidential nominee, he is working hard to win the support of the religious right, analysts said.

Still, McCain's new strategy has risks. By seeming to genuflect to a man he once denounced by name, analysts said, McCain could damage perhaps his biggest political asset: the image that he's a straight shooter who refuses to pander to his audience like a stereotypical politician.

''This tells us that John McCain is a living, breathing politician who has looked in the mirror and said 'I should be president of the United States,' " said Stephen Hess, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution. ''The media built McCain into something more than [a politician] when he last ran for president. They made him into an icon -- the maverick."

In some respects, McCain's reputation as an independent Republican is even stronger now than in 2000. Since then, he has pushed bills limiting political campaign donations, banning the torture of suspected terrorists, and allowing illegal immigrants to become legalized guest workers -- positions that put him at odds with some conservative Republicans.

But on the unofficial 2008 campaign trail, McCain has all but abandoned the outsider posture he adopted in 2000. Courting the party's establishment at a recent GOP convention in Memphis, he outdid all other contenders in supporting Bush in every respect, mounting a particularly vigorous defense of the president's increasingly unpopular handling of the Iraq war.

And today at Liberty University, McCain is expected to reach out to the religious right -- playing up his bona fides as a social conservative, such as his staunch opposition to abortion -- while sharing a stage with Falwell, the televangelist he once criticized.

It remains to be seen whether the religious right will fully embrace McCain. The senator's gesture to Falwell, several analysts said, is symbolic but it alone probably won't move legions of voters. Falwell's political power peaked during the heyday of his Moral Majority organization in the 1980s, and his role has since been eclipsed by younger religious leaders.

His influence has further waned, Green said, because of the accumulated baggage from years of controversial remarks. For example, Falwell said God allowed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as an act of vengeance for America's harboring of ''abortionists," feminists, homosexuals, and liberals.

Bauer, who is also speaking at Liberty University's commencement exercises, said a single speech by McCain won't be enough to persuade Christian conservatives to vote for him.

''For Senator McCain, I think 2000 brought home that you can be a maverick and it's great to have support among independents, but at the end of the day you have to be nominated first, and that's hard to do if the perception is that you're at war with a significant part of your party's base," Bauer said.