Was this the day McCain won the White House?

Lynchburg, Virginia

John McCain has definitely had happier days than last Saturday. As he mounted the podium at Virginia’s Liberty University, once memorably described by its founder, his long-time enemy, as a ‘bible boot camp’ he had a wistful, almost haunted expression. When it was his turn to address his audience of starry-eyed Christian students, there was none of the usual McCain passion and verve. ‘Let me just say that I wish you all well,’ he said. It was hardly the speech to send them out afire to change the world. Rather it was his host, the university’s founder and chancellor, the Revd Jerry Falwell, resplendent in academic robes, who was doing all the beaming — and no wonder.

Six years ago when running against George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination, McCain denounced Falwell, an icon of the Christian Right, as one of America’s ‘agents of intolerance’. Then as his campaign imploded, destroyed by a vicious but brilliantly effective smear campaign orchestrated by social conservatives, he went even further and accused Falwell of having an ‘evil influence on the party’. Now as McCain prepares for another presidential tilt — this time not as an insurgent, as in 2000, but as the party’s frontrunner — he was at Falwell’s side, delivering the university’s annual graduation address.

Has the craggy Arizona senator sold his soul to the devil, as many Democrats believe? Is his appearance with Falwell a sign that the straight-talker of 2000, the moral force who broke with his party to take the Bush administration to task over torture and a range of other issues, will in fact flip-flop and tack like any other bog-standard politician?

A hugely successful television evangelist, Falwell led the Christian Right’s charge in the 1980s and 1990s against gays, feminists, abortion and anything else he thought undermined the nation. Even as the smoke was still rising from the ruins of the World Trade Center, he suggested that ‘abortionists’ and gays were partly to blame for the attacks for angering God by their deviant ways.

‘I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle ...all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say: you helped this happen.’ He later apologised, but only grudgingly and without retracting his words.

I spent the evening before Saturday’s rapprochement 40 miles from Lynchburg with Dave ‘Mudcat’ Saunders, an outspoken local Democratic consultant. He is trying to reconnect his party with the ‘Reagan Democrats’, the blue-collar and rural ‘Middle Americans’ who abandoned the Democratic party in the 1980s and have never really looked back. He was outraged at the idea that I was going to Liberty University. ‘Guys like Jerry Falwell are the Pharisees. If Jesus came back and started talking about loving your neighbours, they would kill him again,’ he said. ‘This visit will backfire on McCain.’

Many Republicans share his distaste for Falwell and will salute his biblical comparison, but I am convinced that his point about McCain is wrong. I left Liberty confident that I had witnessed one of the key moments in the undeclared but already bubbling 2008 presidential campaign. There is no doubt that if McCain gets the Republican nomination, he will face many more demonstrators like the lone protester on the road leading away from Liberty’s campus on Saturday. ‘Shame on McCain for pandering to Falwell’ was the slogan on his ‘Vote Hillary’ banners. But before McCain can face Hillary, his rival frontrunner, he has to navigate the shoals of Republican primary politics — and on Saturday he went a long way towards clearing the most treacherous shoal of all.

It has long been the conventional wisdom in Washington that Hillary Clinton can win the Democratic primary at a canter but will then falter in the election proper, whereas McCain, with his cross-party appeal, could easily win over the nation but might never have the chance because of his difficulties with the Christian Right, which has such a hold on the Republican nomination. It is time to review that theory.

One speech does not make a nomination, of course. Falwell has made it clear that the rapprochement will not necessarily lead to an endorsement of McCain. Senator George Allen, the cowboy boots-wearing wannabe Good Ol’ Boy, is more to his taste. There are also plenty of evangelical leaders who will never be reconciled with McCain. At a recent meeting of top Republicans in Colorado Springs, the stronghold of the Christian Right, party bigwigs were in ‘total panic’, one source at the meeting told me — both at the threat of the party losing badly in November’s mid-term elections and at the thought that McCain might win the nomination.

Yet there are signs that the influence of the Christian Right is not what it was. Splits have occurred in the once monolithic bloc — over the environment and foreign policy. Some of the icons of the 1990s have fallen by the wayside. Social conservatives may still distrust McCain, in particular for his refusal to back a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but if he is seen as the only man to stop another Clinton getting into the White House, then they may fall into line. As McCain’s aides are quick to point out, Falwell approached him, not vice versa.

The overwhelming reaction of the Christian conservatives to whom I spoke as they poured from the university hall was that it might be time to have a rethink about McCain. ‘This will make a difference,’ said Gordon Birch, 63, as he strode out into the brilliant sunshine. ‘It was a simple statement of basic values consistent with people of conservative views. I thought it was outstanding.’ It is not that McCain pandered to his audience, still less to his host. He eschewed religion and steered clear of controversial social issues. Instead he concentrated on the need for reconciliation and also his unwavering support for the war. The latter line caused him trouble at a speech at a liberal New York university this week, but his candour and honesty will ultimately serve him well. His tone and subject reminded me of his address to the Republican Convention in 2004, when he talked movingly of the war without ever backing the Bush agenda. Then too, of course, he did not like his host.

Many obstacles lie ahead, not least that McCain will be 72 on Election Day 2008, older than Ronald Reagan was in 1980. Confidants say that he is pained by the criticism of his trip to Virginia from many of his old admirers in the Washington commentariat. As he learnt in 2000, however, the media are not much of an electoral base. There will be plenty of time to court them again once the nomination is in the bag.