DALLAS - Has Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton improbably emerged as the favorite of the “Guns and God” crowd?

The U.S. media and blogosphere has been ablaze with speculation that conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh may have contributed to Clinton’s narrow victory in Tuesday’s Indiana primary over Barack Obama by urging Republicans to vote for the former first lady.

The speculation is that the “Rush for Hillary” is seen as a way to extend the Democratic nomination battle and further damage the eventual winner.

Limbaugh has also said in the past that he thought Obama needed to be “bloodied up politically, and it’s obvious that the Republicans are not going to do it and don’t have the stomach for it.”

Obama chief strategist David Axelrod, speaking to reporters on Obama’s plane on the way to Chicago from his rally on Tuesday night in North Carolina, said he saw a Rush factor at play in Clinton’s win.

He said Clinton ought to “call a press conference and thank Rush Limbaugh for the victory.” He said the margin of victory for Clinton was so narrow, there is a good chance Limbaugh might have tipped the scales for her. 

“Eleven percent of the total electorate were Republicans. She got 52 percent of those. A large percentage of them said they would favor McCain in a race against Clinton.” 

Indiana has one of the more open primaries which allows independents and Republicans to also request a Democratic ballot on the day they vote.

Do political bedfellows get any stranger than this?

(With additional reporting by Caren Bohan) 

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KEY WEST, Fla. - Rice University professor Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, shared on Tuesday what he said were his eight misconceptions about the evangelical movement before he began researching his influential book.

1. His first fallacy: “I assumed they (evangelicals) had succeeded because they were united,” he told  the “Faith Angle” conference organized by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The reality: he argued evangelicals had sharp divisions but their burning in the belly belief that something is fundamentally wrong with the world drives them and means they can take political set-backs on the chin. 

2. He said his second fallacy was the assumption that “2004 was the pinnacle of evangelical influence in U.S. politics”:

But he said many people he had spoken to said they were disappointed that they had voted for President George W. Bush but in their view received nothing in return. He said the biggest evangelical policy triumph was the 1998 passage of the International Religious Freedom Act, which was aimed at promoting religious freedom as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy and evangelicals had lobbied hard to get approved.

3.  “I thought there was a select group who were kingmakers in the Republican Party like James Dobson (of Focus on the Family).”

The reality: he said what he learned was that it was a movement with strong or very public leaders but they did not have make or break status within the Republican Party.

4. Lindsay said he also assumed that the centers of evangelical power were in places like Colorado Springs, Colo., headquarters for influential conservative Christian groups such as Focus on the Family.

But he said the movement’s centers of power were actually the traditional ones like New York and Los Angeles and that the sharpest evangelical divide was between what he called the “cosmopolitan evangelicals and populists”.  The populists he said are culture warriors embattled against secular society while the cosmopolitans  want a place at the table but want “their faith to be seen as reasonable”.

5.  He said he had assumed that the new issues publicly embraced by the movement such as action on the environment “signaled a party realignment.”

But he said evangelicals are still center/right and among the most loyal of Republicans.

6. He said while the domestic realm was important to evangelicals the really interesting emerging evangelical story is in foreign affairs and the movement’s enthusiasm for foreign aid and investment. 

7. Lindsay also said that he thought church life drove evangelical political activity but that much of the real action was in the “para-church” sector such as universities.

8.  Finally, he said he assumed politics had been the main focus for most evangelicals.
But many of the people he interviewed articulated a view that politics was “downstream of culture.”

- Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Bush at a White House event highlighting National Prayer Day earlier this month)

GRANTHAM, Pa. - There was a moment of levity on Sunday night when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was asked at a nationally televised faith forum whether she believed “God wants you to be president?”

” Well, I could be glib and say we’ll find out,” Clinton said to laughter from the audience.

“But I — I don’t presume anything about God. I believe, you know, Abraham Lincoln was right in admonishing us not to act as though we knew God was on our side,” she said.

The forum was held at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, just over a week before the state’s crucial primary pitting Clinton against Barack Obama, who also addressed the event. Candidates were asked questions about their faith and how it influenced their positions on a range of issues from poverty to abortion.

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Photo credit: REUTERS/David DeNoma (Sen. Hillary Clinton campaigning in Pittsburgh, April 10, 2008)

DALLAS - John McCain still has an “evangelical problem.”

High-profile evangelical conservative James Dobson, who has already said he would not vote for McCain in November, said on Wednesday he saw no evidence the Arizona senator was wooing conservatives.

 ”I have seen no evidence that Sen. McCain is successfully unifying the Republican Party or drawing conservatives to his fold. To the contrary, he seems intent on driving them away,” Dobson, founder and chairman of the influential conservative advocacy group Focus on the Family, said in a statement published in The Wall Street Journal.

Dobson went on to reiterate the problems that he and many other religious conservatives have with McCain, including his failure to support a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

He also took issue with McCain’s speech in March to the World Affairs Council on Foreign Policy, in which he laid out his support for government action on climate change and criticized the U.S. military for its use of torture.

This highlights McCain’s continuing problem with white conservative evangelicals — a group that analysts say he must woo as they have become the most reliable bloc of Republican voters.

Photo Credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking (Copies of James Dobson biography)

DALLAS - The second step in the convoluted caucus and convention process followed by Texas Democrats wrapped up this weekend with the party’s county and Senate district conventions.

Now the final step in this three-stage process will take place at the party’s state convention in Austin June 6-7.

At stake are 67 delegates that will remain up for grabs until the June convention, which could be one of the final battles between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in their bruising fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clinton won the state’s primary and most of the 126 delegates that were on the line in that contest, but local media reports suggest that Obama is leading the long, drawn-out battle for the final 67 delegates. The Lone Star State also has 35 “superdelegates.”

Delegates can change their mind between now and the June convention, so it remains up in the air.

“This will not be determined until the June convention and so the Texas Democratic Party is not calling any winners in advance,” state party spokesman Hector Nieto said.

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DALLAS - The Pew Research Center reported on Wednesday that the U.S. public’s awareness of the number of American military fatalities in Iraq has fallen sharply over the last few months, underscoring the waning interest in the war ahead of November’s presidential election.

Only 28 percent of adults now can correctly say that approximately 4,000 Americans have died in the Iraq war, the nonprofit research group said.

That’s down from August 2007, when 54 percent of those surveyed correctly identified the fatality level at that time — about 3,500 deaths.

The nationwide poll of 1,003 adults taken from Feb 28 to March 2 also found that more respondents underestimated than overestimated the number of fatalities. A plurality of 35 percent said there had been about 3,000 troop deaths, while another 11 percent said they thought just 2,000 have died. Around 23 percent put the number closer to 5,000.

Pew noted that the fall in fatality awareness comes as news coverage of the conflict diminishes.

Pew reported in late February that public attitudes toward the war in Iraq had turned more positive as the security situation there seemed to improve.

The polling group said this was a favorable development for expected Republican nominee John McCain, who is an unflinching backer of the war effort and was an early supporter of the “troop surge” there.

Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both say they will begin withdrawing troops quickly if either wins the November election.

DALLAS - Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in Texas. But voters will have to wait until the June state convention to see who won the caucus.

Local media reports say the party has been overwhelmed by the estimated 1 million voters who showed up to caucus on March 4 under the state party’s complex  system, a hybrid caucus-primary. Dubbed the “Texas Two-Step,” the process actually involves three, the state party says.

The party also says the system is supposed to be a long one anyway with the next step decided at its county and senatorial district conventions on March 29th. But the final allocation of the 67 delegates awarded by the convoluted convention/caucus process will not be alloted before the state convention on June 6/7.

Of the state party’s 228 national convention delegates, 126 are determined by the primary while the Lone Star state also has 35 super-delegates.

For what it’s worth, with about 41 percent of precints reporting, Sen. Barack Obama has narrow lead over Clinton among caucus goers. But just to make things more confusing, delegates can change their mind along the way.

Calling for the process to be reformed, The Dallas Morning News said in an editorial on Wednesday that the state’s influence had been undercut on the national political stage by the confusion, which it said has “left the rest of the country wondering: What on earth is Texas doing?”

It said there were reports of missing results and general disorder.

The state’s party spokesman Hector Nieto says the process was designed in 1988 to accomodate around 100,000 voters, not a million, but insists that nothing is supposed to be set in stone anyway until June.

“Those delegates don’t get allocated and awarded until the state convention,” he told Reuters.

One thing about the convoluted process is clear: These 67 delegates are in play until early June. And in a close Democratic presidential contest that could make a big difference.

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DALLAS - In America, church and state may be separate but the distinction between religion and politics has become increasingly blurred over the past couple of decades.

In the just published book “The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon In America,” authors David Domke and Kevin Coe chart the rise of religiosity in American politics and discuss its implications. They do so by, among other things, comparing the religious language used in presidential addresses, party platforms and other political discourse over the decades.

This includes some imaginative charts such as one that gives the total word count for faith and family in the Republican and Democratic Party platforms from 1932 to 2004. (The Republicans were a bit behind at one time but since 1980 have soared ahead in this count).

Domke, who is a professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle, spoke to Reuters about the “God Strategy” which he says has been used with effect by Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton as well as the Republican George W. Bush.

Q: Can you imagine a party or presidential candidate who could be successful today without employing the “God Strategy?”
A: My answer is no. The reality is that in American presidential politics not willing to publicly emphasize your faith will mean you will not be a serious candidate on either side of the partisan aisle.

Q: How do you see the God Strategy playing out this November?
A: It really is interesting. About six months ago when I looked at the six major candidates from the two major parties, for the first time in decades the Democrats were better situated for a fusion of religion and politics. If you looked at the frontrunners for the Democrats, Clinton, Edwards and Obama, all three of them had been … out publicly putting faith into their issue positions. Clinton had talked about her Methodist upbringing, Edwards had talked about it in terms of poverty, and Obama had talked about it in terms of God in the public arena. All three of them had been much more vocal than any of the major Republican candidates at that time, Huckabee wasn’t really on the radar screen. But when you looked at Giuliani, McCain, possibly Thompson, the reality was that it appeared that the folks on the Republican side were going to be less comfortable with all of this. Now you have McCain who is not very comfortable talking about his faith but will do it. I think we will see some more of that from him. He’ll do it as needed and that will work for him if Clinton is the nominee for the Democrats. If it’s Obama then I think Obama has the higher ground on religion and politics.

Q: You say in your book that the God Strategy in some ways threatens the democratic vitality of the nation? Can you elaborate?
A: In many respects the fusion of religion and politics is absolutely contrary to what the founders desired for the country. They fled religious sectarian violence, religious persecution and they set out build a new place where God would be part of the equation but there wouldn’t be a state, a national religion. And that was unprecedented …

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DALLAS - Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leaders on Monday shook up their flock by issuing their strongest statement to date on the potential perils of climate change and the need to take action on the issue.

The statement, which was signed by SBC President Frank Page, past presidents and other church leaders, was short on specifics but represents a significant departure from the group’s past pronouncements on the issue, which have urged caution and not much else.

Monday’s statement by some of the leaders of the 16 million-member SBC — America’s largest Protestant Church and one of its most conservative — said such caution could be taken as “uncaring, reckless and ill-informed.”

If the membership at large accepts the document, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee John McCain could stand to gain as he has broken ranks with much of his party by highlighting the issue of global warming and talking about “common sense” ways to limit carbon emissions, such as promoting advanced energy technologies.

Having the SBC on the side on climate change could give McCain some needed traction with conservative evangelicals who have not warmed to him because of his failure to adopt their strident positions on a range of social issues from gay marriage to stem-cell research.

The SBC statement also is another step in closing the divisions between the old culture warriors of the religious right and the so-called “evangelical center,” which sees a broader Biblical agenda that includes issues such as combating poverty and environmental degradation.

The statement was not entirely unexpected since many conservative evangelicals are known for their passion for the outdoors. A comprehensive nationwide survey in 2006 of licensed hunters and anglers commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation found that half of those polled identified themselves as evangelical Christian.

Hunters and anglers often are the first to note changes in the climate or environment.

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-Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (SBC President Dr. Frank Page, second from left, meets with President Bush in the White House’s Oval Office in 2006 with Dr. Morris Chapman, left, president of the SBC Executive Committee, and Chapman’s wife, Dayle, right.

DALLAS - Another exit poll has uncovered more evangelical Democrats and indicates that their agenda seems to be moving beyond the “God, Guns and Gays” focus of the Religious Right’s old culture warriors.

An exit poll commisioned after Ohio’s Tuesday primary by Faith in Public Life, the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Sojourners asked both Republicans and Democrats if they were evangelical or born-again Christian. Almost all other polls have only asked this of Republican primary voters as this group is widely regarded as a key base for the GOP.

The poll, conducted by Zogby International, found that 43 percent of white evangelical Ohio primary voters took part in the Democratic primary and 57 percent in the Republican one.

Other national polls still show over 60 percent of white evangelicals firmly in the Republican camp but analysts have said they do not expect them to play quite the same role in this November’s election as they did in the 2004 White House race, when by some estimates  around 78 percent of those who cast ballots did so for President George W. Bush.

The Tuesday poll also found that 42 percent of Ohio’s white evangelical voters ranked jobs and the economy as the most important issue area in deciding how to vote versus 14 percent who ranked abortion and same-sex marriage as the most important issue.

Such a finding may not be surprising in a Rust Belt state like Ohio, which has been shedding manufacturing and other jobs.  But the poll also found that 54 percent of white evangelical primary voters surveyed wanted a broader agenda such as ending poverty and protecting the environment.

The poll had a fairly wide margin of error of 5 percentage points.

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