Exactly who are these "ignorant media elites"? I really didn't find that Robertson's endorsement got that much play. I would have placed it in the entertainment section rather than news anyway.

It seems to me that the scandal or alleged scandal at rather small Oral Roberts University in Tulsa has received far greater attention.

I've revised the post for your benefit, Joel.

Although I basically agree with the post, I think it misses one important aspect of this:. Granting that it might not affect the really core, politically-engaged parts of the base, nonetheless endorsements by recognized brands like Robertson can go a long way towards making Rudy palatable towards the squishier, less-attentive, pro-life-but-not-movement-conservative sectors of the GOP (and swing) electorate. So Robertson gives Rudy valuable cover, for those voters, when contrasted with guys like Huckabee.

squishier, less-attentive, pro-life-but-not-movement-conservative sectors of the GOP

But doesn't this comment also assume that they care about a Robertson endorsement or that they look to him for leadership?

This reality dawned on Republican Party elites after the relatively poor turnout of evangelicals in 2000 caused President Bush to lose the popular vote. So in 2004, Republicans did not lean on Christian Right organizations to get out the evangelical voter. . .

And 2004 turned out to be a squeaker, too.

The GOP didn't learn the real lesson of 2000 (and subsequent election years). Conservatives in general elected a Republican Congress in 1994 with a lot of promise for reform, some of it itemized in the Contract With America. After some early successes (some of which led to balancing the budget), the Republican Congress made some serious PR blunders and eventually stopped fighting for reforms. The lesson of 2000 is that voters will not vote for a paper tiger.

If the GOP fails to reach the many evangelicals that aren't tied to Chrtistian organizations, it's mainly because it's done such a shoddy job of reaching out to conservatives in general.

But doesn't this comment also assume that they care about a Robertson endorsement or that they look to him for leadership? No, not necessarily. I was really thinking of the signal value here. The endorsement invites the kind of voters I was talking about to think, "Gee, Robertson's a hard-core pro-life guy, so if he thinks Rudy's ok..." More attentive or thoughtful voters might not use such heuristics, but those voters aren't that large a fraction of the electorate (though surely they are a larger proportion of the primary electorate).

It's Robertson the _brand_ more than Robertson the _man_ that is relevant here. It's a question of marketing, not leadership.

I just realized that my last sentence, if you swapped in "Rudy" for "Robertson", would completely sum up the Giuliani campaign.

It's Robertson the _brand_ more than Robertson the _man_ that is relevant here. It's a question of marketing, not leadership.

I took part of the column's point to be (and my point was) that both Robertson the brand and Robertson the man have no significant impact on social conservatives.

Depends on who you mean by "social conservatives". If you mean something like "NRO subscribers and the like", then what you say is right. But then my point is that there are a lot of voters who would thereby not count as real social conservatives, but who have a basically conservative orientation, even though they aren't really particularly politically engaged or (moreover) attentive. There are a great many unreflective, not particularly _political_, but _culturally_ conservative voters, ones for whom Rudy's one-note "WE'LL KICK THEIR ASS!" message really resonates -- they're _his_ base -- but who also tend to be pro-life. And affiliating the Robertson brand with Giuliani makes it easier for those voters to pull the lever for him.

Just to be clear: there are of course lots of unreflective liberal-leaning voters, too. (A non-trivial fraction of Ron Paul's supporters seem to be such, for example, grooving to his clear anti-war message and not paying attention to the other aspects of his political platforms that they really shouldn't like, such as his being adamantly pro-life. And you've got to figure that Kucinich supporters can't be the most politically reflective sorts.) So, nothing in my comments on this thread is meant to have any liberals vs. conservatives content to it.

Rudy told Robertson he would appoint supreme court justices like Alito and Roberts and Robertson understands that a president really can't do a lot more on the moral issues that interest most Christians.
I doubt if the endorsement will bring Rudy any votes he wouldn't already get if he is the Republican nominee.

Josh,

One of my points is that the term "media elites" is so overused as to be almost meaningless. Adding in the word "ignorant" is hardly illuminating but rather a rather lazy way of saying very little.

The fact remains that this was a 2-3 day story. Most journalists well-understood that Robertson's more recent reputation has been for quirkiness and that his day has passed. I myself calmed down about Robertson after I realized how few people give credence to such of his statements as that the United Methodist Church represents the spirit of the anti-Christ.

The examples you give of media elites are underwhelming to me.

I think the problem is that the media elites don't have a clue about religious life. It's just not part of their world, so they don't know matters and what doesn't. It's as if I tried to write about the personal social lives of jellyfish. I should stick to stuff I know about.

And those words from that Washington Post blog are amusing. For example, "...one of the most influential figures..." Maybe Robertson is one of the most prominent TV celebrities, but I doubt there was any fact-checking to back up the assertion that he's an influential figure. They have no more to go on than I did when I speculated about the extent of religious knowledge among the media elite.

Also, ya gotta love those weasel words, "...is widely viewed as...". In other words, they're making stuff up. But what else would they be able to do?

"...one of the most influential figures..."

People who say that also overestimate Robertson's popularity among his fellow conservative Protestants.

Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to suggest that he's influential among Catholics.

Another common bit of cluelessness about religious conservatives is a tendency to treat their political beliefs as being just religious in nature. Abortion is a prime example; a pro-lifer could get on a stage and talk for hours about prenatal research and quote Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine and the whole scientific nine yards, and a goodly segment of the audience would write it off as religious blather.

In case you are considering casting your vote for Rudolph Giuliani for President of The United States, a few things you should know;

New York was once a city portrayed as ungovernable. Remember "The French Connection, "The Panic In Needle Park", "Midnight Cowboy", "Escape From New York", "Death Wish", "Bonfire or The Vanities" and "Taxi Driver"?

New York is now arguably the safest big city in America... and Rudy Giuliani had nothing to do with it. The overwhelming evidence confirms that most of the city's problems started to abate well before Rudolph Giuliani took office as mayor in 1993 by defeating incumbent mayor, David Dinkins.

Dinkins signed into law a tax surcharge the put 6,000 more police officers on the streets. He also hired a pair of dynamic new leaders, Ray Kelly as police commissioner and William Bratton as head of New York's transit police.

During Dinkins's term the city's murder rate fell by 13.7 percent, robbery fell by 14.6 percent, burglary fell by 17.6 percent and auto theft fell by 23.8 percent. New York City's crime rate dropped in all seven FBI major-felony categories for the first time in nearly four decades.

Similarly, the notorious porn shops and movie theaters along 42nd Street that Giuliani would later claim to have closed himself had in fact already been shuttered as the city began transforming Times Square. Indeed, the last graffiti-covered subway car had been taken off the line in 1989...under Mayor Ed Koch. Even the "squeegee men" - homeless people who wiped the windshields of cars against the owners' wishes and then hassled them for payment - had been removed from the streets by the time Giuliani took the oath of office in January, 1994.

Giuliani's two terms as mayor are the only elective office he's ever held and he has achieved virtually nothing of significance in that time. He presented no sweeping vision of his city's future, built no great public buildings, instituted no real reforms, and in fact made no meaningful effort to restructure New York along either liberal or conservative lines.

It is true that crime continued to drop during his mayoral reign, as it did all around the country, for many reasons. In the meantime, police response time actually increased by 24 percent in his first term and the percentage of felony arrests leading to indictment dropped by almost on third.

Even a cursory examination of the facts make it clear that Giuliani's handling of the attack on September 11, 2001, and its aftermath was a debacle.

The Office of Emergency Management that he created failed utterly to coordinate rescue efforts between the city's Police and Fire Departments. Worse, it also failed to ensure that the New York City Fire Dept. had an effective system of communicating with itself - a deficiency that had been exposed by the original 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and one that led eight years later to hundreds of firefighters' being cut off in the towers, without any way of receiving word that the buildings were about to collapse.

Giuliani, on-site throughout the disaster, made no attempt to devise any other means to keep firefighters informed. In 2004, as New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn make clear in their book, 102 Minutes , Giuliani lied against the memory of these brave men, falsely testifying before the 9/11 Commission that they had refused orders to evacuate.

In the days and weeks after the attack, Giuliani failed to ensure the the army of workers digging out Ground Zero had adequate protection against hazardous waste, an oversight that now seems to be leading to serious, long-term health consequences for thousands; proposed that his term in office be arbitrarily extended for an indefinite period in order to deal with the recovery; and placed his mistress and future third wife, Judith Nathan, on the board of a charitable fund for families of the attack's victims

He would later urge his police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, to accept a job training the new Iraqi police force, a task he failed at dismally before scurrying back to New York. Kerik was then nominated (on Giuliani's recommendation) to become the new head of Homeland Security, before background probes uncovered an embarrassing pattern of ethical improprieties. These included Kerik's appropriation of an apartment designated as a rest area for exhausted World Trade Center excavators as a love nest for his affair with his publisher, Judith Regan. And now, he's apparently prison-bound.

It is imperative, I think, that we all remember that there was a Rudy Giuliani before 9/11 and
that we ignore that Rudy Giuliani at the peril of our future peace and safety.