Gary Bauer is the only person I know who has both run for president (in 2000) and served as president of the Family Research Council (in the 1990s). So I called him this week, figuring he'd have some thoughts about FRC's Values Voter Summit, which opens today at the Hilton Washington and will include appearances by every GOP presidential candidate. (The Democratic candidates were invited, but to a man - and a woman - they declined. A divergence of values, no?)
The big question in the run-up to the summit has been whether well-known social conservatives - such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, and Bauer - will conclude the conference (2,000 are expected to attend) having decided to support one or another of the GOP presidential candidates. Bauer told me his "personal hope" is "that we can put aside the speculation about a third party," started by Dobson in a New York Times op-ed calling for social conservatives to back a third-party candidate should the two major-party nominees fail, in effect, to share his values. Bauer says such talk "has been unhelpful. While I understand the frustration that drives it, it has been demoralizing to many of our friends in Washington that we count on." Those friends, of course, are GOP leaders and strategists. "We" count on "them," in Bauer's formulation, but the reason the third-party speculation has been demoralizing to those Republicans is that they, Bauer knows, count on us. Social, which is also to say religious, conservatives have since the 1980s reliably provided Republican presidential candidates with more support than any other voting cohort.Bauer is not reluctant to talk about the frustration social conservatives have with the GOP candidates. "None is flawless," he says, before going on to list the flaws of each. Some of Bauer's friends, he says, "have started making lists of candidates for whom they can't vote. For some, it's a short list - just one candidate. For others, it's three or more." Or more! I ask Bauer whether some lists have as many as four or five names on them. Yes, says Bauer. "And I just don't understand that. I've even heard speculation among good people that four years of Hillary [as in Rodham Clinton] would be just what the doctor ordered. But I think the country will need more than a doctor after four years of Hillary. Too much is at stake," starting with, in Bauer's view, the future of the Supreme Court.
Bauer is dismayed that some of his colleagues seem willing to apply a religious test - to base their votes on whether or not a candidate is a Christian. "I would prefer someone who shares my [faith]," says Bauer, before noting that being a Christian believer doesn't necessarily mean an officeholder will be right on the issues. Consider, he says, the disappointing case of Jimmy Carter. "We work with all sorts of people on causes we care about. And God is able to use all kinds of people," not just Christians. "Mitt Romney [a Mormon] and I would have deep disagreements over matters of faith. But I would have significant differences on theology with a Catholic or a Jew or an agnostic or an atheist." Bauer's point is that "significant differences on theology" shouldn't foreclose voting for someone not of your faith - or (to borrow the George W. Bush formulation) of no faith at all.
Bauer has some interesting things to say about the candidates: On Fred Thompson, that he could hold the southern base of the party. And on Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, that "a lot of people feel that Romney wouldn't destroy the [social-conservative] movement whereas they feel that if the party nominates an openly pro-choice nominee, then that could destroy the movement" as a force within the GOP. Giuliani is the one Republican candidate who seems to give Bauer the most heartburn. "With Rudy, I will not support a third-party candidate. But Rudy will have to have very serious conversations with significant people and will have to embrace in public certain things that he's not been willing to do." He points to the speech on abortion that Fred Barnes suggested this week as one that Giuliani should give.
So who will the values voters favor in the straw poll to be taken this weekend? "I think there's going to be a strong tendency to gravitate toward a second-tier candidate if for no other reason that there's a certain feeling of satisfaction one can get doing that." But is Mike Huckabee still a "second-tier candidate"? Maybe, but maybe not. In any case, predicts Bauer, "Huckabee will do very, very well" in the poll.
Bauer ends our interview with a would-have-been: "If George Allen hadn't lost his Senate seat, right now he would look like the clear conservative choice. And we'd now have a two-man race: Giuliani versus Allen." And Allen would do well among the social conservatives this weekend. But, if that were the case, think how much less interesting things would be as the days count down to the Iowa caucus, now scheduled for January 3.
