Fired McCain Campaign Aides Sound Off
In separate interviews, Elwell and Haynes emphasized that they had spent decades in the rough-and-tumble world of political campaigns and that neither had previously experienced similar treatment by a campaign. Elwell was a key player in getting antiabortion language inserted in the GOP platform for the first time in 1980, served as a top strategist for Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential campaign, and led the successful effort to amend Michigan's Constitution to ban gay marriage in 2004. Haynes was a Christian Coalition regional director in the 1990s and served as deputy political director of Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign.
The reports of McCain's religious outreach effort threaten to further fray his already tenuous ties to the religious right. McCain has drawn the movement's ire with his opposition to a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, his role in passing campaign finance reform—which Christian-right groups have alleged inhibits their ability to organize before elections—and his branding of Christian-right leaders in his 2000 presidential campaign as "agents of intolerance."
While Elwell and Haynes managed to organize meetings with evangelical pastors and Roman Catholic clergy on McCain's behalf, they said they were stymied by the campaign in implementing more ambitious plans. Elwell says she never received approval on a budget for her Americans of Faith effort or for her plan to mobilize national grass-roots support for McCain.
One of Elwell's first priorities was identifying faith outreach directors in early 2008 primary and caucus states, but she says the campaign refused to approve her selections. Elwell says that she hired a Michigan religious outreach director but that the campaign refused to pay him and that the relationship ended after two months. Haynes says that she identified a potential state director in South Carolina but that her request to hire the person was never acted upon by the campaign.
Elwell and Haynes also said they were denied access to McCain campaign manager Terry Nelson and to senior strategist John Weaver. Elwell and Haynes say their direct supervisor in the campaign, David Rexrode—who previously spearheaded religious outreach for the Republican National Committee and who was involved in a massive church directory collection effort for the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004—was unresponsive, declining to return up to a half-dozen phone and E-mail messages per day. Rexrode is coalitions director for the McCain campaign.
Both Elwell and Haynes say they were not opposed to the plan to collect church directories per se but opposed to that effort being the linchpin of the religious outreach effort. "They'd say, 'How many church lists did you get?'" says Elwell, "and I'd say that pastors don't want that [to give campaigns church lists]. And I'd say, 'Besides, that's not going to deliver the vote.' But no one ever listened to me or heard what my plan was."
Though collecting church directories has been a tactic employed by previous presidential candidates, particularly Republicans, it is controversial. The Southern Baptist Convention's Land, for instance, criticized the Republican National Committee's use of the tactic on behalf of George W. Bush in 2000. "To share the church directory with anyone outside the church body is a violation of the sanctity of the body," Land told the Associated Press in 2004.
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