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John McCain\u2019s campaign has begun quietly reaching out to conservative Christian activists, including onetime Mike Huckabee supporters, but those activists remain highly skeptical of the Arizona senator and his ability to rally the GOP\u2019s evangelical base in November. \u201cI was schmoozed a great deal, and he was a very nice guy and I asked pointed questions,\u201d says Bob Burney, an influential Christian radio host in Columbus, Ohio who met with McCain\u2019s liaison to the Christian Right last week. \u201cBut to be honest, it did not alleviate my concerns.\u201d\n\u201cThe last time [McCain] ran, he didn\u2019t do anything to woo conservative evangelicals,\u201d said Burney, a host at WRFD The Word, which reaches about 80 percent of Ohio. \u201cNow, all of a sudden, he\u2019s had a miraculous transformation and wants support from the evangelical community\u2026 I\u2019m very dubious and honestly cannot decide whether I can vote for him or not.\u201d
\nMcCain\u2019s effort to mend fences with the Christian Right is being led by Brett O\u2019Donnell, the longtime coach of the championship debate team at Liberty University, of Jerry Falwell fame. O\u2019Donnell didn\u2019t respond to email messages for comment and the McCain campaign declined to provide a phone number for him.
\nAccording to the debate team homepage on Liberty University\u2019s web site, O\u2019Donnell has coached there and at Penn State for 14 years and served as an advisor to President George W. Bush for the 2004 presidential debates. The web page says O\u2019Donnell is on temporary leave.
\nBesides WRFD\u2019s Burney, O\u2019Donnell also met last week with Chris Long, president of the Ohio Christian Alliance, formerly the Christian Coalition of Ohio. \u201cThere\u2019s still a very cool feeling toward McCain with a lot of evangelicals and conservatives,\u201d said Long. \u201cThe candor in the explanations was helpful, but it will just take some time to review the process. Certainly [McCain] is pro-life and has been conservative on some issues, but he\u2019ll have to articulate what he plans to do.\u201d
\nBurney and Long both cast ballots for Huckabee in yesterday\u2019s Ohio primary. According to exit polls, Huckabee won 48-percent of Republican voters who identified as born again or evangelical, compared to 45-percent for McCain. Those voters made up 44-percent of the GOP electorate.
\nA handful of activists who\u2019ve been contacted by McDonnell said his efforts represented McCain\u2019s first concerted outreach to them since a team of high-profile religious conservatives were fired by the campaign last spring over what it called performance-related problems. \u201cIn the end, you came away with the strong sense that they had contempt for the faith-based community,\u201d Marlene Elwell, one of those staffers, said at the time of several senior McCain aides. \u201cThe way we were being treated it was as if we had leprosy.\u201d
\nKansas Senator Sam Brownback has been helping McCain improve relations with the Christian Right since halting his own presidential bid last fall, but that effort has been focused largely on national leaders in the movement and on Catholics as opposed to evangelicals.
\nThe evangelical activists who\u2019ve been contacted by O\u2019Donnell ticked off a well-worn list of complaints about McCain from religious conservatives, including his opposition to an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage, his support for federally-funded embryonic stem cell research, his role in drafting federal campaign finance reform, and his participation in the so-called Gang of 14 agreement between Republican and Democratic senators in 2005 to avoid an historic change in Senate rules.
\n\u201cI was quite impressed that they did call and reach out to social conservatives,\u201d said Phil Burress, a prominent Ohio evangelical who leads a group associated with Focus on the Family and who met with a McCain liaison last week. Burress declined to name that person, activists familiar with the meeting identified him as O\u2019Donnell. Burress said he told the McCain liaison, \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t be talking to us now\u2014you should be listening to us say what you need to do.\u201d
\n\u201cHe\u2019s got a shot at getting us riled up for him,\u201d Burress said of McCain. \u201cBut if he thinks we\u2019re going to get excited and work for him because the other two candidates [Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton] are so bad, that doesn\u2019t work. We want to be proactive and not reactive.\u201d Burress said he was personally prepared to vote for McCain and applauded McCain\u2019s pro-life record and his leadership on combating obscenity in the broadcast media.
\nTwo prominent evangelical activists in Texas said the conservative Christian outreach that McCain was doing in Ohio was absent in advance of the Lone Star State\u2019s primary yesterday.
\nMichael Farris, a prominent evangelical activist in Virginia who\u2019d supported Mike Huckabee, said McCain had turned down a meeting with him and other conservative Christian leaders last year. \u201cThere\u2019s only one way for me to read that,\u201d said Farris, who organized similar forums that met with George W. Bush and other Republican candidates during he 2000 presidential race.
\n\u201cHe has to stop saying he hates Christians who are involved in politics,\u201d Farris continued, referring to McCain\u2019s characterization of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in 2000 as \u201cagents of intolerance.\u201d \u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned, that\u2019s still on the table\u2014he\u2019s never taken it off.\u201d
\nSeveral evangelical activists said McCain\u2019s next big test with the movement arrives this Friday, when they say McCain is scheduled to speak at a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a coalition of powerful conservative activists. It was at the Council\u2019s September meeting that a handful of Christian conservatives voiced support for a plan to back a third-party candidate in the event that Rudy Giuliani got the GOP nomination.
\nOther Republican presidential candidates have appeared at recent Council for National Policy meetings, but several members of the secretive group said this was McCain\u2019s first appearance.<\/p>\n