DES MOINES — The Republican candidates for president (with the exception for Mitt Romney who declined and Jon Huntsman who wasn’t invited) met at a large church here Saturday night for a debate aimed at Iowa’s social conservatives.
For the most part, the debate stood out for its focus on doom, gloom and widespread Christian persecution. Except for the part when Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and new frontrunner Newt Gingrich teared up under some personal questioning from Frank Luntz. That was different.
There’s a debate this cycle here in Iowa about how important the social conservative vote will be to the final outcome of the caucuses. Though in years past candidates had to reach out to Iowa’s conservative evangelicals to have a shot at the first prize on the primary calendar, Republicans TPM spoke with this week said it looks to them like social conservative support isn’t as important this time as in, say, 2008 when Mike Huckabee rode an evangelical wave to victory.
Voters are more concerned about the economy, TPM was told on more than once occasion by Republicans here. The social conservatives just don’t have the pull they used to. That’s good news for Romney, the Mormon who flamed out in Iowa in 2008 and is only running a poorly-kept secret campaign here so far this time.
Still, Saturday was for the social conservatives. And so they got their moment — and essentially two hours of prominent Republicans talking about how persecuted Christians are in modern America, and how secularism is out to destroy us all.
Family is “the bedrock of our society,” Santorum — a social conservative if ever there was one — said. Failure to protect “the institution of marriage,” he said, means “our country will fall.”
Bachmann spoke about tax rules that keep preachers from working for candidates from the pulpit. “Probably the greatest amount of censorship today is in the pulpits of our churches,” she said.
Most of them had some similar lines, but it was Gingrich who really poured on the gasoline.
“The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our civilization and deserves to be taken head on and described as what it is,” he said, “which the use of government to repress the American people against their own values.”
There was support for a Constitutional amendment making marriage between a man and a woman (only Ron Paul said he opposed that idea, though he expressed his support for DOMA) and talk of an amendment that would make abortion illegal. It was the kind of thing you’d expect to see a lot of at a social conservative event — and it led to the kinds of answers from Republicans like Bachmann that you’d expect.
Then there were the tears. Under questioning from Luntz about personal failings and their path to faith, most of the candidates broke down. Bachmann teared up as she talked about her path to Christianity from her parents’ messy and tragic divorce. Santorum told a heartbreaking story about a handicapped child that led him to break down. Cain and Gingrich avoided the elephants in the room and chose not to talk about their many wives (in Gingrich’s case) or sexual harassment charges (in Cain’s). Instead, Cain broke down when talking about his battle with cancer and his wife’s aid through it. And Gingrich appeared to shed a tear about a young family friend who had to live through some difficult surgery.
The crowd was engaged, hanging on every word of these personal stories. But with no Romney (and no C-SPAN, which also pulled out) it’s hard to say what impact Saturday’s event will have in the long run. It certainly showed that the candidates haven’t lost their touch when it comes to social conservatives — and that evangelicals aren’t done talking about marriage and other issues, even if the country’s more interested in talking about something else.
