Can Giuliani Be the Armageddon Candidate?

Posted by Sarah Posner at 8:30 AM on February 6, 2007.

Glenn Greenwald today challenges the conventional wisdom that Rudy Giuliani's presidential candidacy is a sinker with conservative evangelicals. Greenwald's right about a couple of things: first, that foreign policy, particularly Middle East policy, will be more important to conservative evangelicals in '08 than gay marriage and abortion, and second, that Giuliani's messy personal life, including his divorces and adultery, won't alone doom his candidacy with these voters because . . . ah, well, you know, we all fall. (Even John Hagee, the country's leading Christian Zionist, is divorced.)

Unless Giuliani unequivocally flip-flops (like Mitt Romney has, including vociferous denunciations of the citizens he once served as governor of Massachusetts) from his stance on gay rights, his skeletons won't be his divorces and adultery, but his political views, as evidenced by this or this or this. For these voters, anyone can be a convert, but they have to prove it. Romney's getting there. Giuliani has a long way to go. His favorable remarks about the Supreme Court's most reactionary members -- and his promises to promote more of the same -- won't be enough.

Hagee's enormous success in building Christians United for Israel over the past year has sent a forceful signal that Armageddon very well could be be '08's evangelical GOTV tool. All the pieces are in place: Hagee's remarkably effective grassroots political organizing, his ability to garner tete-a-tetes with the White House, John McCain's trip to San Antonio to breakfast with him, the increasing chaos in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, the deja vu-ish saber rattling over Iran. And, after all, there aren't many states left [PDF] in which to advance gay marriage bans in order to turn out more likely Republican voters.

But politically conservative evangelical voters, ones who are motivated by people like Hagee or Rod Parsley or other theologically and politically conservative preachers, wouldn't see someone like Giuliani as a righteous defender of the the worldview they think they are fighting for in this showdown between "good" and "evil" (i.e., Christianity and Islam). Many of these voters see themselves as soldiers in a war to defend their version of Christianity -- one which unequivocally condemns homosexuality, abortion, adultery and secular government institutions. Being a hawk -- even on Iran -- won't alone cut it. The right candidate for the Christian Zionists will have to be a hawk and a perceived defender of the faith. Probably the bigger question for the Republican presidential candidates, though, is how cozying up with the Christian Zionists will play with the rest of Americans -- the majority of whom have had it with the war.

Tagged as: hagee, christian zionists, guiliani

Sarah Posner is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared on Alternet, The American Prospect, The Gadflyer, and in other publications.