When I add my voice to Arianna Huffington's to say that Senator McCain has changed -- for the worse -- my perspective isn't that of your traditional lefty making some sort of knee-jerk response against just anyone running as a Republican candidate. I went for to bat for McCain in 2000 (in my small way) and later McCain was kind enough to write a glowing endorsement of one of my books on the military. While it was a dual between McCain and Romney I even contributed to McCain's 2008 presidential run. This was at the same time as I was also contributing to Obama's campaign. Talk about being conflicted!
I had been out of the right-wing Evangelical fundamentalist subculture for more than 20 years so I was surprised when Religious Right leader Gary Bauer called me. This was in the heat of the 2000 election. Gary had a favor to ask.
"Frank, I know we haven't talked for many years but will you help me stop George W. Bush from winning the Republican nomination? There are still a lot of evangelicals out there who remember your dad and you from your pro-life work in the seventies and I think the Schaeffer name could help stop the Bush/Rove smear machine from taking McCain down."
Gary had heard that I was a McCain fan. But I had to think long and hard before I agreed to argue for McCain and against Bush on various radio shows, including such right wing staples as Ollie North's program and on a dozen or so big Christian stations. The idea of having to relive my past activism even briefly, was abhorrent. When I'd left the evangelical movement, let alone the hard right, I'd felt as if I'd escaped a living death, the death of a thousand cuts by terminal stupidity and meanness.
I agreed to go on shows Gary booked because I wanted W to lose even more than I wanted McCain to win. You see my family knew the Bush tribe personally, given that my dad had been a welcome evangelical leader in top Republican circles for many years. And everyone close to the Bush family knew that W was the least fit member of that dynasty to elect for dog catcher, let alone president.
A large station in Los Angeles organized a debate between Bush-booster Ralph Reed and me. When Ralph found out who his opponent was going to be he backed out. According to the producer; "Ralph says that he won't debate you. He said he'll debate anybody but you."
I knew why Ralph didn't want to go up against me. In his circles the Schaeffer name was still huge. Reed, Robertson, Dobson, et al. could not have existed (as Republican activists) combining theology and militant (even anti-American) politics without my dad's work paving the way for them. And back in the day I'd been a pretty big deal on the fundamentalist circuit too.
I had been off the "circuit" for years but was still remembered as my father -- evangelist Francis Schaeffer's - sidekick. In the mid eighties I'd fled the religious side of evangelicalism, as well as the political side. I made four terrible Hollywood movies then wrote novels that were well received and started a new life. Blessedly, I fell off the evangelical radar screen.
Then in 2006 I wrote several opinion pieces supporting James Webb against the same Republican attack machine that had tried to take down McCain in 2000. The Rove slime apparatus had called McCain the father of an illegitimate black child. This time Rove and Co. were calling Webb a "pornographer" because of some sexually explicit passages in a few of his Vietnam novels.
I was so disgusted that I re-registered as an independent voter and said so in an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News. Soon after that my anti-Religious Right memoir Crazy for God was published.
My old buddies in the Religious Right (most of whom had long since forgotten I existed) took note and began attacking me. (Depending on which right wing blogs you read these days, I'm now a "heretic," have broken various biblical commandments about "honoring" your parents, never was a "real Christian" and even the fact that my son was a Marine and fought in Bush's wars, still gives me "no right to criticize the President" for his misbegotten war etc., etc.)
I feel genuinely sad observing that McCain is now the most dangerous man in America. He is. He has becomes the enemy of our future.
Here's why:
Both Republicans and Democrats have their versions of a lunatic fringe. The Democrats include people who think they're making a contribution to the country by picketing recruiters' offices in Berkeley or rooting for total pacifism -- whatever. There are plenty of wacky left-wingers running around who don't do much for the Democrats' image with mainstream America but ... the wacky left does not control the heart of the Democratic Party, as the tremendous success of the eminently sane, balanced and thoughtful Senator Obama proves.
The problem is that you can't run for president as a Republican these days without appeasing the insanely bellicose, Republican fringe. As such McCain has had to endorse Bush's war and suck up to the most vile elements to his right.
Today McCain is a man who's thinking has also been so twisted by his quest for power in the shadow of the Republican's "base" and their opposition to him over the years, that he has lied about his real feelings about Bush's Iraq war. McCain knows that we should never have gone to war. He knows his vote for the war was a terrible mistake, He knows that Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq until we opened the door. He knows we're losing in Afghanistan because we're in Iraq. He knows Bush is literally a fool. (He has said so to plenty of people I know well personally.) But McCain wants to be president enough to lie about all this.
Now that McCain has adjusted his thinking to continue (and praise) the Bush policies he can't turn back. He hasn't exactly made a bargain with the devil, more like a pact with the village idiot.
As Bush's new lickspittle McCain is now so bent on eternal war, and has gone so far in betraying himself to support Bush, that he's even been agitating against Senator James Webb's new GI Bill, which would (at long last!) improve college benefits for soldiers. The Pentagon says that the new bill is too generous, and would entice young men and women to go to college instead of serving for repeated tours of combat. (These benefits would include McCain's Marine son, but then again if you've got a wife with 100 million dollars who needs college benefits for your military son?)
McCain has also climbed into bed with the Ralph Reed-type scum he once called "agents of intolerance" and who smeared him not only in 2000, but worked this year to defeat him while supporting Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. The only question is: has McCain changed his mind? Does he really believe in the Religious Right's BS, or is he just lying for convenience sake? Either way, forget the old "straight talk maverick."
A vote for McCain is a vote against a viable Republican Party. It's a vote for the poisonous lunatic fringe that's taken over the heart of the Republican Party and driven people like Arianna Huffington and me, and tens of thousands others, out. A vote for McCain is a vote to kill American service men and women, deprive those that survive our failed imperial conquest of benefits and condemn the rest of us to terrorist attacks as Afghanistan--where the real war on terror is--is lost due to our foolish involvement in Iraq.
As Huffington points out in Right is Wrong, the Republican fringe includes an unholy alliance of warmonger neoconservatives, evangelical fundamentalist leaders, and just plain old ignorant haters. This fringe has made the Republican Party into a reactionary, know-nothing habitat for racists, pro-torture sadists, advocates of eternal war and the instigators of a skyrocketing debt for the sake of-and caused by-failed imperial "glory."
McCain's base is putrid. Worse; it's stupid. And the rot has spread to the man trying to appease and "lead" it. But leadership means elevating people, not pandering. And that is what McCain has become: the panderer in chief.
Our job -- whatever party we are in -- is to stop McCain. W can't afford another 4 years of Bush. We need a president, not a panderer. It is also the biggest favor we can do for the Republican Party.
The Republicans need a time out. They need to purge their party of the idiots who gave us Bush II, not be ruled by them once again. I'm not a Republican any more, but if I were I'd be praying for defeat this year for the good of the party, for the good of America. As it is, I thank God that in Senator Obama we have the most inspiring and thoughtful candidate to run for president in my lifetime.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back"