Welcome to the 700 club, Rudy

By Walter Shapiro - Salon.com, Analysis
Thursday, November 08, 2007 - Web Link
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November 8, 2007

Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani Wednesday morning may have triggered an earthquake in national political circles, but here in the most socially conservative of the early primary states, there were only faint tremors on the Richter scale. In fact, the early evening local newscasts did not even mention the Pat-and-Rudy odd-coupling, even though Giuliani had swooped into the area for a cameo appearance late afternoon at his state headquarters.

A quick canvass of South Carolina political experts produced the tentative conclusion that Robertson's blessing will register only at the margins, if at all. "The Christian right is always locally autonomous, and they don't take direction from their presumed leaders. I don't think this will signal a mass stampede by the evangelicals to Giuliani," said Danielle Vinson, a political science professor at Furman University.

Even more skeptical was David Woodard, a political scientist at Clemson University, also a Republican political consultant. "Pat Robertson roared into the state in 1988 after he finished second in the Iowa caucuses, and everybody thought that the Christian Coalition would deliver for him," Woodard recalled. "Instead George H.W. Bush thrashed him."

As he sat in his office in Greenville under a Bush-Quayle poster from that 1988 race, Republican strategist Chip Felkel, who is non-aligned in the Jan. 19 GOP primary, grappled with the implications of Robertson's rendezvous with Rudy. "I suppose it's significant that a nationally recognized religious leader has taken that step," he said. "The [Christian] coalition is not what it used be, but it's still important." Felkel regarded the Giuliani endorsement as similar to the anointing of Mitt Romney by Bob Jones III, the chancellor of Bob Jones University in Greenville, in late October. "What it said to a lot of people is that if they like Romney, it's OK to be for him."