ePluribus Media OhioNews Bureau

COLUMBUS, OHIO: If Sens. Obama or McCain want to become the nation’s next president, Ohio, with its 20 electoral votes, remains a key state to capture on their road to the White House.

With Ohioans having elected Republicans to run Buckeye government from the office of governor to the legislature and everything in between from the early 1990s to 2006, when voters installed Democrats into four of the top statewide power offices but kept the legislature in the control of the Ohio GOP, its safe to say that on any given day, based on fiscal and social temperament and values, Ohio is a right-of-center state.

Will McCain’s Pastor Problems Turn Buckeyes Off to Him and On to Obama?

With all this back and forth between candidates, their faiths and the endorsements from proselytizers who use religion as either a battering ram or a free meal to support or demolish their agendas are enough of a factor to swing enough votes to either one to put Ohio in their win column in November has yet to be seen. But two recent polls, one done by Quinnipiac University and one done by SurveyUSA stand in contrast to each other, giving both Obama and McCain talking points, limited as they are.

So when Arizona Sen. John McCain, now the presumptive standard bearer for Republicans in the fall, garners the endorsement of an uber mega firebrand preacher like Rod Parsley, who is master and commander of his 12,000-member World Harvest Church located in a suburb of the Ohio capitol, the promise such an endorsement brings in terms of energizing the base of evangelicals who will turn out to vote for him is too much to pass up.

But in the same manner that the firestorm over Sen. Barack Obama’s relationship with his controversial pastor forced to him to first create a fire zone between the candidate and his pastor and then to disavow his endorsement and the vitriolic comments about race and patriotism that dominated the media for weeks on end, so too has McCain had to untangle himself from Parsley’s castigation of Islam as “the anti-Christ religion."

In a political pirouette of astounding audacity from the days of his run for the White House in 2000 when he called the Revs. Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance" who used their "evil influence" to control the Republican Party, McCain has bowed on bended knee before the pulpits of two current evangelical firebrands who have issued their own style of blazing bile about passages from the Bible that castigate the Roman Catholic Church as a "Great Whore" and conclude that America was formed, in part, to see the religion of Islam destroyed.

Playing to the far right in Ohio has been assumed to be a tried and true way to win votes and enter elected office. But as we saw in 2006, that path to power failed when the darling of evangelicals, Ken Blackwell, a Cincinnati native who had served as both state treasurer and secretary of state, got pummeled in his bid for governor by a lopsided margin not seen since the early 20^th Century.

Parsley’s support of Blackwell, fortified by the pastor’s creation of the Center for Moral Clarity, whose mission is to “affect moral change in our nation by encouraging passionate and persuasive Christian leadership, educating Christians, mobilizing believers in an organized fashion and by providing a wide-range of tools needed to equip everyone from the five-fold ministers to the individuals to be a voice in our nation,” while it didn’t make Blackwell governor is still a potent force in Ohio politics and should be expected to come to the aid of McCain, who referred to Parsley in February in Cincinnati as a “spiritual guide,” which prompted Parsley to call McCain a “strong, true, consistent conservative.”

ARE OHIO EVANGELICALS SWITCHING PARTIES?

In one exit poll funded by the liberal activist groups The Sojourners, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Faith in Public Life which was based on a telephone survey conducted by Zogby International on March 4, the day before the Ohio primary this year, it revealed that 57 percent of Ohio's white Christian evangelical voters cast their ballots for Republican candidates while the remaining 43 percent voted for Democrats.The poll, which was disputed by Christian advocates like Ralph Reed, a political strategist and former president of the conservative Christian Coalition who called it flawed, showed that 54 percent of evangelical voters identified themselves with a "broader agenda," beyond abortion and same-sex marriage to include ending poverty, protecting the environment, and combating HIV/AIDS. Thirty-nine percent favored a more limited agenda of opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. In an MSNBC exit poll from the general presidential elections in 2004, 76 percent of those calling themselves evangelicals in Ohio voted for George W. Bush with the remaining 24 percent voted for Sen. John Kerry. Moreover, in Ohio's March primary, 54 percent of church-goers voted for Huckabee compared with 45 percent who voted for McCain.The question of these numbers is whether evangelicals are shifting to Democrats and will they shift enough to support Obama?

McCain’s refuting of Parsley’s hostile comments on Islam came on the heels of his take down of Texas televangelist John Hagee, whose spouting of Bible babble about gays and Jews and Hitler was so over the top that McCain had to jettison him from his campaign as quickly as he would have thrown a live hand grenade from the cockpit of his Vietnam-era fighter jet.

But insiders from the Blackwell campaign are now working with Parsley, so the circle of religion remains unbroken. In its article on McCain’s Parsley problem, The Columbus Dispatch offered a new sighting for Gene Pierce, Blackwell’s political spokesman, showing the connections between the two remain strong and that nuts don't fall far from the main tree.

Parsley’s rage over Islam as the “anti-Christ religion” and his support of McCain doesn’t seem to make a difference, if the latest SurveyUSA poll results are considered. With no vice presidential candidate factored in, Obama leads McCain among Ohio voters by a nine point spread.

A TALE OF TWO POLLS

But in the latest Quinnipiac University Poll, McCain tops Obama by a slim margin of four points, while Sen. Clinton, who isn’t forecasted to win the nomination unless some major changes take place in Rule Committee fights at the end of May, leads McCain by seven points.

As Obama strives to connect with white, working men who have been reticent to support him in strong numbers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia but who remain a bulwark for Parsley and his aggressive breed of Christian evangelicals, the religion card Parsley will play will have an affect, but the impact of that affect may be diminished as other issues like the economy, job loss and the rising cost of fuel and food displace moral values which don’t do anything to bring jobs back to Ohio, put food on the table or gas in the tank of his followers who are as likely to have their homes foreclosed on them as any other group.

Parsley's rage may not be rosy or ready for prime time. But in a battleground state where the margin of victory in November maybe no more than a quarter-million votes, it could tilt the political game board enough to McCain if Obama doesn't brandish his Christian values in a way that neutralizes the attacks that are being directed at him, giving evangelicals, many of whom throng to Parsley's palace each Sunday, to consider whether the senator from Illinois can better deliver on the larger issues of the economy, jobs, education, fuel and food than the senator from Arizona.

John Michael Spinelli is a former Ohio Statehouse government and political reporter and business columnist. He now serves as the OhioNews Bureau Chief for ePluribus Media Journal. Find ONB archives here. If readers have a news tip or story idea about Ohio politics or government, contact the OhioNews Bureau at: \n \n \n \n \n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it