Fired McCain Campaign Aides Sound Off
Two former aides hired to spearhead religious outreach for presidential candidate John McCain say that they were virtually ignored by the campaign and that McCain's top campaign strategists are intent on winning votes of religious voters without having to develop serious ties to faith communities. The aides, who were fired in early April after roughly three months on the job, said the campaign staff declined to return scores of their phone calls and E-mail messages, denied them access to leaders of the McCain campaign, and pressed them to collect church directories—a controversial tactic—as the centerpiece of a strategy to woo "values" voters.
"In the end, you came away with the strong sense that they had contempt for the faith-based community," says Marlene Elwell, one of those fired staffers. Elwell, a prominent Christian-right activist, was hired by McCain in December 2006 to be national director of his "Americans of Faith" coalition. "The way we were being treated it was as if we had leprosy."
The McCain campaign said the aides' dismissals were performance-related and were part of a broader staff reshuffling earlier this spring that grew from weaker-than-expected fundraising.
"We have the opposite of contempt—we have a great deal of affection for that [faith] community and a desire to help them understand that [McCain] is a good candidate for them," says Bob Heckman, senior consultant for the McCain campaign on conservative outreach.
But the other fired staffer, Judy Haynes—a former top Christian Coalition official hired to work under Elwell—had an assessment similar to Elwell's, saying in a separate interview that the campaign exhibited "a contempt for Christians."
"It's an attitude about the Christian community that they don't like to have to do [outreach] but that they need to do it," Haynes said, referring to the McCain campaign's religious outreach plan. "Like, if we can get what we want without having to get too close [to religious people] and not make a big display, we'll do it."
Haynes said she was particularly disturbed by what she called the campaign's overreliance on collecting church directories as an organizing strategy. "The campaign plan to get the [religious] vote is to rape and pillage the church [membership] lists, and we didn't want to do that."
A source close to the McCain campaign said that Elwell and Haynes were hired as a package and that the rift between the pair and the campaign hinged on opposing visions for religious outreach. The source said Elwell wanted to hire dozens of field staffers to do church-by-church organizing at a cost of millions of dollars. The campaign, the source said, favored an effort built on wooing state and regional religious leaders and relying on volunteers to organize individual churches.
The McCain campaign's Heckman said that, far from exhibiting hostility to religious conservatives, McCain speaks regularly with such prominent evangelical figures as former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, Southern Baptist Convention public policy chief Richard Land, and televangelist John Hagee. Heckman, himself a veteran of Bauer's 2000 presidential campaign, also noted that McCain has hired former Christian Coalition field director Guy Rodgers to help with national religious outreach and Marlys Popma, an evangelical Christian and former head of Iowa Right to Life, as a top Iowa staffer.
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.
In interviews in February, Elwell and Haynes expressed obvious enthusiasm for McCain, particularly over his decades-long record opposing abortion rights. "I'm going to be telling McCain's story to Christian conservatives so they get to know the real McCain, not the way they represent him in the media," Elwell said in February. Elwell had interviewed with presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney, Sam Brownback, and Duncan Hunter before accepting the job with the McCain campaign.
Both former McCain aides stressed that they still had respect for the Arizonasenator, saying it was his top staff who seemed to take a cynical view of religious outreach. "I have a great deal of respect for John McCain and what he has done for the country," says Elwell. "He's given his whole life to his country, first through service in the military, by being a prisoner of war, and then giving back with public service."
After failing to get in touch with McCain's top staffers after she was dismissed from the campaign in April, Elwell received a call from McCain himself last week. The senator told Elwell he would look into her grievances and get back to her.