Bryan Fischer
August 19, 2008
The night Obama lost the election
By Bryan Fischer

It is a political fact of life that evangelicals play a determinative role in presidential elections. The 36% of evangelicals who voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and the 38% of them who voted for Clinton in 1996 handed the White House for eight years over to an administration which aggressively promoted abortion rights and the homosexual agenda.

George Bush's overwhelming support among evangelicals in 2000 and 2004 gave him the White House, especially in 2004 when evangelicals turned out in impressive numbers to re-elect him.

It is likely that the presence of a marriage amendment on the Ohio ballot in 2004 was decisive for the president. Ohio gave the presidency to Bush, and it was the marriage amendment that gave evangelical voters additional incentive to go to the polls.

If Sen. Obama loses this year's election, my suggestion is that his defeat can be traced back to his performance at the Saddleback Church Civil Forum last Saturday night.

Evangelicals heard him declare his unbending supporting for abortion rights and Roe v. Wade, his flatly declared opposition to a federal marriage amendment, and his determination to appoint activist judges to the United States Supreme Court. I believe his performance fatally wounded his chances to make significant inroads among evangelical voters, despite his determined efforts to bring them over and McCain's virtually non-existent efforts to appeal to evangelical voters.

Polls have recently delineated a pronounced shift in the evangelical community away from Sen. Obama as his radicalism on important social issues has become more transparent.

The exposure of his deception in denying that he had voted for infanticide should be a showstopper for evangelicals.

Despite his denials, his own campaign was forced to admit over the weekend that he had, while an Illinois state senator, in fact opposed a bill to provide medical help to infants who were born alive after surviving abortion attempts. The final version of the bill contained language identical to the federal law that passed the U.S. Senate 98-0, thus placing Obama far to the left of even the most extreme pro-abortion lawmakers in his own party.

The only thing that can preserve his chances for the White House is if Sen. McCain makes the suicidal decision to appoint a pro-abortion running mate, a possibility he himself has floated and has refused to dismiss. If McCain is politically tone-deaf enough to stick his thumb one more time into the eyes of pro-life voters by putting an abortion-rights supporter one heartbeat away from the Oval Office, he deserves to lose.

A second prediction I will make is that last Saturday represents the last Civil Forum Pastor Warren will be able to host. No Democratic contender will again repeat Obama's mistake, by morally undressing himself in front of the intense scrutiny of a nationwide audience.

Democrats all across the fruited plain are admitting that Obama got waxed in this forum, in no small measure due to his stumbling, stammering performance in coming up with answers to straightforward questions. He nuanced himself right out of the White House. His supporters have been left to sputter, without a shred of evidence, that McCain won because he cheated.

McCain, by contrast, even though he has given voters ample reason to distrust him (see following segment) appeared decisive and direct by comparison.

However, my good friend David Ripley, executive director of Idaho Chooses Life, reminds readers of Sen. McCain's troublesome record on the pro-life issue, a record that does not match his rhetoric from Saturday night. As Ripley points out, McCain as recently as 2004 urged President Bush to force you and me as American taxpayers to pay out of our own wallets and against our will for life-destroying embryonic stem cell research (ESCR).

As I pointed out yesterday, McCain's support for ESCR defies his own logic, since he stated unequivocally Saturday night that babies have human rights "at the moment of conception." This should, by any extension of rational thought, make him unalterably opposed to the destruction of babies in their tiniest form, but sadly it does not.

And just when Republicans were on the cusp of breaking the Senate's stranglehold on conservative nominations to the Supreme Court, McCain snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by forming the infamous "Gang of 14" that has resulted in bringing conservative appointments to federal appeals courts to a virtual standstill.

The vacancies created by this McCain-facilitated logjam have resulted in judicial emergencies and a huge backlog of unsettled lawsuits simply because appeals courts do not have enough judges to deal with them.

Democratic obstructionism has successfully impeded the filling of these slots, and there is every indication that they will be able to hold the president at bay until the next president assumes office. Should Obama prevail, the enhanced Democratic majority in the Senate will result in a whirlwind of activist appointments to the federal bench, setting back the cause of constitutional justice literally for decades.

Additionally, the aging liberals on the Court will retire during Obama's first term, and will be replaced by younger, equally liberal jurists who will forestall the return to the rule of law rather than the rule of men for the foreseeable future.

And for that, my friends, we will have Sen. McCain to thank.

As Ripley points out, this is surely a sad state of affairs for those of us who believe profoundly in the Founders vision for our country, a place where the unalienable right to life would belong to every American no matter how small and no matter how many Josef Mengeles wanted to turn them into subjects for life-destroying medical research.

© Bryan Fischer

 

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