KIM LEHMAN (Iowa Delegate): It wasn’t as lukewarm as much as it was waiting to see if John McCain was going to hold to his commitment to have a pro-life administration.
[KIM] LAWTON: Lehman says McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate changed everything.
Ms. LEHMAN: It was like taking a rubber band, pulling it backward and just shooting us through excitement. And so all of us being on the reciprocating end of emails, phone calls””everybody’s excited.
Governor SARAH PALIN (during acceptance speech, Republican National Convention): We are expected to govern with integrity, good will, clear convictions, and a servant’s heart.
LAWTON: The nomination of Palin, an evangelical Christian who bly opposes abortion, has been controversial in some quarters. But it has clearly mobilized the Republican Party’s social conservative base and given the McCain ticket a big boost of energy. Many in that base were deeply concerned in the weeks leading up to the convention when McCain’s campaign floated the idea of picking a pro-choice running mate.
Dr. RICHARD LAND (President, Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission): I told the McCain people flat out that would inflict a mortal wound on his campaign, one from which he could not have recovered. If he had picked a pro-choice candidate, he was going to lose. He still may lose. But that would have been it. He could never have recovered among evangelicals and social conservative Catholics if he had picked a pro-choice running mate.
The principal advantage the GOP has in this area is the historical ability to have on its platforms contradictory religiously motivated stances. It then willfully ignores all of them if Republicans get elected. The Democrats usually are much more principled in their secularism. I’m not sure which phenomena is better for the American people.
One has to be careful when intermixing faith and politics; there is grave danger of watering down the faith.
Thanks for the above comments; I agree with both.