Hardly a warm embrace. Our old friend Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values in Ohio, greeted the fall campaign with all the enthusiasm most of us would have for a dirty sock found by the side of the road:

The e-mail said in part: "I was once one of those people who said ‘no way’ to Sen. John McCain as President. No longer. The stakes are too high. And if Obama wins I need to be able to get up on November 5th, look at myself in the mirror, and when I pray, say, ‘Lord, I did all that I could.’”

Well, as Burress himself once said, they don't like McCain, and he doesn't like them. So it's not so much that they find themselves pulled into support for McCain as pushed away from Obama, to whom they attribute various demonic and/or apocalyptic qualities.

But a weak presidential candidate isn't the movement's only problem:

"Our shared conservative evangelical values and our concern about judicial activism compelled us to unite around the presidential candidate who most closely aligns with us,” Staver said. “That candidate is obviously Sen. John McCain. United we will move forward to advance our values in the short- and long-term. We are committed to a transgenerational, multiethnic and multiracial conservative movement."

Various speakers lamented the lack of a unified strategy that had evangelicals supporting various primary candidates and the fact that their message does not seem to resonate with younger voters, African-Americans or Hispanics in the same way Sen. Barack Obama’s does.
         
More than an hour was spent listening to younger leaders tell the group that religious conservatives must be perceived "to care" about social issues and the environment to appeal to young people who are voting for the first time.

Those younger leaders have been trying and trying to get their elders to listen, but whippersnappers come second only to disobedient wives and moderate Republicans in the disapproval column in this set. So best of luck with that, folks.

Reading the stories about the Religious Right's come-to-John moment, I couldn't help wondering what had changed their minds. Actually, that's not true, either. Doug Wead had the answer earlier in the week:

Evangelicals welcomed John McCain’s meeting with Billy Graham today, but more importantly, recent appointments, such as Pam Pryor as senior advisor at the RNC, is sending their morale soaring.

After feeling like they had been hung out to dry, with the dumping of Pastors John Hagee and Rod Parsley, evangelicals are feeling a little better about John McCain.  His meeting today with Billy Graham came just in time.  In fact, if my e-mail bag is any indication, for the last ten days some evangelical leaders have been feeling downright warm and fuzzy about the Republican nominee and primarily because of his willingness to use born again Christian staffers at the RNC and in his campaign. 

...

McCain now has a gaggle of evangelical activists, including Iowa, pro-lifer, Marlys Popma, former Gary Bauer political director, Robert Heckman, and a Liberty University debate coach named Brett O’Donnell.

But the recent appointment of Pam Pryor as senior advisor to the RNC’s Deputy Chairman, Frank Donatelli over at the Republican National Convention has the evangelical leadership positively smiling.  Pryor, the little firecracker who served for years as Administrative Assistant to former congressman  J. C. Watts and later helped Dave Donaldson move Faith Based Initiatives through the Clinton congress, (yeah, you heard me right, Clinton, not Bush, although it was called Charitable Choice,) is no outsider to the rough and tumble of Washington politics. Pryor, an evangelical who attends McLean Bible Church in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. is smart and effective and knows how to play the game.  A reputation for absolute loyalty to her boss, she is not the token evangelical that adorns most presidential campaigns.  She can think, act and work the Washington scene well and her connections in evangelicaland are truly extensive.

This is the signal to many evangelical leaders that the McCain team is sincerely planning to reach out to its Republican base.  After Carter, Reagan and Bush they grew skeptical of religious testimony and promises of legislation.  They demanded appointments, wisely concluding that “people are policy.”  It was partly why Herbert Walker was not re-elected in 1992, many evangelical leaders decided he had failed to deliver on promised appointments.

This is the same guy who thought Jenna Bush's wedding moved the nation to tears, so take this with a grain of salt.

But if he's right, it means that McCain has mollified the Religious Right leaders with his very own patronage game. And you wonder why I'm skeptical about Obama's continuation of Faith-Based Initiatives? At least it's McCain's money at stake (or Cindy's, anyway), not the government's.

And if Wead's right about why the Religious Right machine has moved behind McCain, it might also explain who wasn't at the meeting:

Noticeably absent from the meeting ...

... was James Dobson, whose Focus on the Family organization is located in Colorado Springs, an easy drive to Denver.

Dobson just last week caused a stir with a commentary taking strong exception to Obama's reading of the Bible. But he clearly is still having trouble warming up to McCain.

Dobson doesn't go to other people; he prefers they come to him. But he also doesn't much care about the patronage aspect. He has his own well-funded empire, and doesn't feel the need to scramble after crumbs.

No, what he likes is to have his considerable ego massaged. Lord knows why, since he's consistently wrong in his politics. Don't look for him to get behind McCain until the senator comes up with twenty reasons Jim Dobson's a genius and absolutely necessary for the preservation of Christian family values in America, though.

Update: Fred got there first.