Jay Cost over at the Real Clear Politics Horse Race Blog has a very interesting bit of speculation as to why James Dobson may have pulled the "third party candidate" idea out. I suspect he may be on to something here. It was never about a real third party challenge – it was about a cheap way to get a message out.
I think that perhaps they are trying to signal to their constituency that Giuliani does not stand with them. Do not underestimate the monetary expense of this kind of mass communication. The rank and file Christian evangelical voter is not yet paying full attention (remember that most of them are not members of the interest groups that these people lead) – and to communicate a message to them could be very expensive because they are diffused across the country. They do not all live in one or two media markets. They are in every media market. Accordingly, they might need to do something drastic, like get Giuliani's pro-choice stance in all the papers and television shows by threatening a bolt from the GOP.
Read the whole thing, it is very well reasoned – and I suspect he may have hit it right on the head. Cost points out the best and worst case scenarios for such a third party. The worst case is pretty much the complete and utter political self-immolation of the people who tried the third party option. Something I suspect Dobson would not be willing to risk.
(I stand by my earlier posts on this, though. It is the courts – pure and simple – that are at stake. Keep your eyes on that – it means everything.)
I find Jay Cost’s theory a bit hard to swallow. For one thing, I think his reasoning is flawed about Dobson, Bauer, and Perkins being out to “educate” Christian conservatives about Giuliani’s liberal views on social issues. To which candidate are Dobson, Bauer and Perkins trying to turn these voters to? Cost’s comment that, “I think that perhaps they [Dobson, etc.] are trying to signal to their constituency that Giuliani does not stand with them” seems to be a rather barren political strategy. Frankly, Cost failed to make his case.
Cost is also leaving out the possibility that Christian conservatives like Dobson and Bauer might be genuinely frustrated with the weak-kneed GOP. Given the totalitarian nature of the modern Democrat Party – with its growing taste for censorship, anti-Christian bigotry, political witch hunts, corruption, appeasement of Islamofascism, and the imperial unaccountable-to-anyone judiciary – a third party would be a disaster. But while I plan to vote for Giuliani (strictly because of his views on national security), the GOP should not assume that I am a lock in every election. I will vote for a GOP candidate that I agree with 10% of the time against a Democrat that I disagree with 100%. But why should I bother if it is obvious that I will not even get that 10%? Lincoln Chafee comes to mind.
Here is something else that I am concerned about. Consider black voters and the Democrats. Black leaders have for the most part sold themselves body and soul to the Democrat Party. The result is that these “leaders” resemble a bunch of modern-day Stepin Fetchits – comical, dimwitted, ignorant buffoons toiling in service of their white liberal masters. The only bone the black community gets tossed is that every two years the Democrat Party whips up wild conspiracy theories about the supposed revival of the Ku Klux Klan and the legalization of lynching if the GOP wins.
What happened to black voters in the Democrat Party could happen to conservatives in the GOP. That is why I am not totally unsympathetic to a third party. It might shake the GOP leadership out of its “me, too†complacency.
Well under the Republican administration the partical birth abortion procedure was banned in 2003, something Reagan never even addresssed so look at that as a major acomplishment; particularily note that it was many in the medical community who had finally brought the issue to Congress in 1992.
That said, taking into account that many in the pro-life movement are not invested in any political issue other than abortion my concern is they will move into the Ron Paul camp: he will end up receiving all the envelope stuffers, the phone callers, the door knockers which the Republican Party desperately needs.
Ron Paul is the third party I worry about, not James Dobson’s.
The Centrist or right of center Republicans may think Ron Paul’s a crank but Paulites are as devoted to Paul as the Reaganites were to Reagan.
As for Guiliani, I hope that the Centrist and right-of-center who supports Unsecured Borders in a time of war and Illegal Immigration does not crush his GOP nomination; there are a lot of Democrats who are against the Centrist’s Amnesty plan.