The Palin Payoff: How Sarah Brings in the Christian Cash

By Bill Berkowitz and Mike Reynolds, Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Posted October 1, 2008.

Research for this story was supported by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Until John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, Obama attack ops -- whether political action committees or their 501(c)4 partners -- were struggling mightily to raise the kind of cash that fueled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear machine in 2004. More than $45 million poured into that effort to sink John Kerry's campaign, mainly from the pockets of wealthy Bush backers. A review of Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign donations back in June of this year showed that the big Swift Boat donors -- such as Ohio investor Carl H. Lindner and family, Dallas pharmacy magnate Harold C. Simmons, Texas homebuilder Bob Perry and oilman T. Boone Pickens -- were putting their money elsewhere, either pouring it directly into the McCain campaign or sending it off to Republican Congressional races, the Republican Governors Association or Newt Gingrich's PAC, American Solutions. But all that changed when the evangelical pro-life Alaska governor stepped up to the podium in Minneapolis to accept the Republican nomination for vice-president. Overnight the culture warriors, who'd been grumbling about McCain from the sidelines, were back in play. The Council for National Policy, one of the Christian right's most secretive strategy bodies, immediately endorsed the "values"-enhanced McCain ticket, triggering a $10 million infusion of campaign donations from evangelicals and their associates on the hard right. In this volatile race for the White House, they may yet make the difference. Call it the Palin Payoff.

In 2004 white evangelicals went for Bush over Kerry by a 57 percent margin -- 78 to 21. Among non-Hispanic Catholics, Bush beat Kerry 56 to 43. Together the white evangelicals and non-Hispanic Catholics accounted for 44 percent of all voters in that election. A September poll by Pew Research shows that McCain, once despised by the Christian right, was now -- post-Palin -- climbing toward Bush's extraordinary numbers. On August 13 McCain already held a wide margin over Obama among white evangelicals -- 68 to 24. When Palin, a diehard abortion foe, came on board those numbers jumped to 71 for McCain and dropped to 21 for Obama. In August non-Hispanic Catholic voters were deadlocked between the two candidates with McCain and Obama each at 44 points. After Labor Day and the addition of Palin, McCain opened a 7 percent lead over Obama among these Catholics -- 48 to 41. All that happened before the Christian right came off the sidelines and onto the playing field with an anti-Obama political action offensive powered by an infusion of millions of dollars. With this revitalized social conservative machine behind them, McCain and Palin now have an opening to gain ground in such crucial battleground states as Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado and Wisconsin.

On September 15 Born Alive Truth, a 527 out of Mokena, Illinois, launched a $338,000 TV ad blitz in Ohio and New Mexico tarring Obama as a supporter of infanticide. The 30-second ad featured a Nashville abortion survivor, Gianna Jessen. Born Alive Truth is fronted by former nurse and Christian right player Jill Stanek. Stanek, a one-time operator with Concerned Women for America, advocates against "partial birth" abortion and fought access to Plan B, the emergency contraception pill, by saying it would become a tool of "rapists and male sexual predators." Now a columnist for the ultra-right website WorldNetDaily. Stanek is known for repeating bogus claims that the Chinese dine on human fetuses and that Terri Schiavo was fully cognizant at the time her feeding tube was removed. In one classic column, Stanek equated Parkinson's victim Michael J. Fox with Hitler for his support of embryonic stem-cell research:

He supports human embryonic stem-cell experimentation, thus contending that some humans are subhuman and expendable for others' personal gain. We know there is nothing new under the sun. So Fox's character flaw is not new, just a variation of the worst of human behavior throughout history. Slaveholders thought those whose lives and deaths they controlled were "property," as the U.S. Supreme Court determined in the 1857 Dred Scott decision. Hitler thought Jews were evolutionary mistakes. The Islamic government of Sudan currently has it in for black Christians. Different day, different holocaust ... The future Fox wants to create for his three daughters looks bleak. No longer will only hens lay eggs for human consumption if Fox has his way. His daughters will be exploited for their eggs, too.

Catholic multimillionaire Raymond Ruddy, one of Mitt Romney's significant backers from Massachusetts, likes to keep a low-profile -- as John Malloy, the secretary for the charity Ruddy founded, told this reporter, "Ray's the man, but we like to keep him under the radar." But Ruddy single-handedly underwrote the TV ad campaign. Ruddy sits on the board of Maximus, the giant government services provider in Reston, Virginia, that pioneered welfare privatization and then grew fat from the Bush Administration contracts.

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Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering right-wing groups and movements.

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