All indications are that the remainder of this week, leading up to the South Carolina primary, will be just as interesting as the week prior to Iowa… and the week prior to New Hampshire.
One of the key parts of the Cruz strategy is energizing Evangelical Christians to turn out to vote for him much as they did in Iowa.
In a recorded phone message made to South Carolina voters on Sunday night, James C. Dobson, the evangelical leader, called on Republicans to support Senator Ted Cruz for president as the only real alternative to Donald J. Trump.
In the message, which was paid for by the Courageous Conservatives PAC, an outside group supporting Mr. Cruz’s campaign, Mr. Dobson said the other candidates in the race were essentially helping Mr. Trump.
“Other Republicans are certainly worthy of consideration, but at this point it looks like a vote for anyone other than Ted Cruz is a vote for Donald Trump,” Mr. Dobson said in the message, a recording of which was obtained by The New York Times. “For people of faith, who care about religious liberty, life and marriage, it’s time for us to rally around Senator Ted Cruz.”
Mr. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a powerful Christian activist organization, backed Mr. Cruz late last year. But his endorsement may be consequential in South Carolina, where a significant bloc of the primary vote comes from conservative evangelicals.
I’m not a huge follower of which Evangelical leaders are actually leading much of anything. Dobson has always seemed to me to be a genuinely Christian man who isn’t trailed by a miasma of smugness and whiff of corruption. Whenever I see alleged church men, like Jerry Falwell, Jr., endorsing what can only be described as a neo-pagan because of a thirst for money and association with celebrity longing for a Peronist strongman and using “render unto Caesar” in a way foreign to two thousand years of Christian theology I want to gag.
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