Some Evangelicals Unhappy with Republican Party
CAIN (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It feels really incredible in a moment of seriousness to receive the nomination of the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. It's a very humbling...</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know those guys aren't around anymore.</s>FOREMAN: With that little dig at John McCain's age, it could be a hint of the kind of smash mouth cage fight we can expect in the general election. Here to help me referee it all, Mike Madden, Washington correspondent for salon.com and Republican strategist Rich Galen who writes on his own blog, mullings.com. Rich, let me start with you. It does appear that even as the Democrats have been sorting this out, the Republicans have been taking shots from the sidelines and beginning to probe what they think are weaknesses in either candidate, but especially Barack Obama.</s>RICH GALEN, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: I don't think there's any question that the betting line as Damon Runyon once wrote, the race doesn't always go to the swift nor the battle to the strong but that's the way to bet. And I think that's the way Republicans are betting now. So they're probing, probing, probing and I think the little back and forth that we saw last week about Hamas on one side and losing his bearings on the other side, that was exactly what was going on there. They're just seeing where the weak spots are.</s>FOREMAN: Mike, what do you think the weak spots are that they have discovered already? Because certainly you could argue that while they were getting the guns ready, the Democrats were handing them ammunition as they attacked each other.</s>MIKE MADDEN, SALON.COM: I think a lot of the weak spots are those that Hillary Clinton has already found for them. You talk to Republican strategists like Rich and they will say Jeremiah Wright is fair game. Bill Ayers is fair game, the notion of questioning Obama's patriotism sort of in subtle ways and whether he's too liberal and sort of out of touch with mainstream voters, all the stuff that Senator Clinton has been doing through the campaign I think you can expect Senator McCain to do.</s>FOREMAN: Republicans are going to follow up. In his conversation with Wolf Blitzter, Barack Obama right here appeared to bring up that age issue, one that's sure to reappear with this upcoming contest with McCain. Let's take a look at this.</s>OBAMA: ... for him to toss out comments like that, I think is an example of him losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination.</s>FOREMAN: Only hours later, the McCain campaign came out with a blistering response. He used the words losing his bearings intentionally, a not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue. We have all become familiar with Senator Obama's new brand of politics. First, you demand civility from your opponent, then you attack him, distort his record and send out surrogates to question his integrity. It is called hypocrisy and it's the oldest kind of politics there is. Wow, Rich. The Democrats have been saying for ages, the Republicans are going to play tough, this looks like it.</s>GALEN: That was Mark Salter and he's pretty good at this stuff. So there is a, I think what you saw there was that when McCain talked about Hamas would rather have an Obama presidency than a McCain presidency, that went to, I think, where the Obama people feel either intellectually or psychologically or both most vulnerable, this business that crinkles around the Internet that maybe Obama might be Muslim, maybe he went to Muslim schools. We don't know that stuff and that really -- I think that the reaction of Obama was a reaction to that. Let me just finish this. He also went on to say that we shouldn't have any name-calling right after that piece. You just call a guy a horrible name but then you say, oh, we're not going to do that.</s>FOREMAN: Plenty of that going on. I want you to listen to another one here if you can very quickly from what Mitt Romney had to say. He's been kind of quiet and suddenly he popped up with this hardball.</s>MITT ROMNEY (R) FMR. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: If you look at Barack Obama you see say person who is well spoken and articulate. He can read a prompter very well and energize a crowd, but he has not accomplished anything during his life in terms of legislation or leading an enterprise or making a business work or a city work or a state work. He really has very little experience. And the presidency of the United States is not an internship.</s>FOREMAN: Mike, I think that this battle in a large way is going to break down to this issue of experience in part because the converse to what he is saying, which is that Obama is not experienced, is going to be exactly what Obama said about Hillary Clinton. Yeah, John McCain is really experienced in the old ways of Washington and that's what you don't want any more.</s>MADDEN: He's too experienced and the wrong kind of experience, I guess. But that's actually what Governor Romney is saying is exactly what a lot of McCain's senior aides, in particular Mark Salter, have been saying about Obama for a while. They sort of see him as building an impressive movement, but a movement that's mostly about himself. You know, they would like people to focus on the difference between McCain, who's spent years in public service on behalf of his country versus Obama who they think is a relative newcomer, who doesn't have a whole lot of accomplishments to show for himself.</s>GALEN: This is like a third-party campaign, the Obama campaign, which almost always are sort of cults of the individual.</s>FOREMAN: Why do you say that?</s>GALEN: Because it's like Ross Perot, who is the guy, "Unsafe at Any Speed?"</s>MADDEN: Ralph Nader.</s>GALEN: Ralph Nader. It is not, this happens to be in the Democratic Party, but it really is about Barack Obama. And that's typically what happens with third party candidates. Everybody kind of gets excited.</s>FOREMAN: Couldn't some people argue that about John McCain as well though, because John McCain, he doesn't fit into the glove really well of what the Republicans thought they were looking for six months ago.</s>MADDEN: I think that's what's interesting. If you're an opponent of Obama it's easy to look at Obama's campaign and say well it's all about him. But clearly he's attracted millions of supporters across the country who don't see it as all about Obama. They're responding to something beyond just we like this guy a lot. There may be a fundamental lack of understanding. If you like him, you like him. If you don't like him, it's hard to figure out why people are so excited.</s>GALEN: You don't have to like the way politics is done in Washington. It is the way it's done in Washington. We are speaking earlier about Hollywood. You are don't like Hollywood, but if the three of us said, we're going to go out and make movies, we'd would be stripped naked at Hollywood and Vine by noon because we have no idea how the game is played.</s>FOREMAN: Rush Limbaugh doesn't like Barack Obama and he always has something to say. Listen to what he was saying this week.</s>RUSH LIMBAUGH, RADIO SHOW HOST: We have done our part to expose Obama through our support of operation chaos effectively using the Clinton campaign as our foil. And Obama and the Democratic Party are the weaker for it.</s>FOREMAN: Well, I don't know really in the end if the Democrats are the weaker for it as much as Republicans may wish it, because the simple truth is what you're saying. McCain and Obama are going to be playing an awful lot on the same field, the field of the moderate, middle, the strength of the people who might go either way. That is going to be a tough battle, isn't it, Rich?</s>GALEN: This is a 50/50 country. What nobody can figure out -- if they say they can --</s>GALEN: You got to get to 274 electoral votes and whatever it takes to get there, each side will try.</s>FOREMAN: It'll be a battleground, thanks Mike, thanks Rich. Straight ahead, heaven help us, are we seeing a real change in the politics of evangelicals? But first, see if you recognize this quote, I can't believe the way you do business out here. That's how Chili Palmer (ph) described Hollywood in the great movie "Get Shorty" and nothing seems to have changed. Sources say movie mogul Harvey Weinstein who backs Hillary Clinton called Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi this week and allegedly threatened to cut off fund-raising for other Democrats unless she backs his plan for a revote in Florida and Michigan. Pelosi reportedly said no rather emphatically and Weinstein now says he wasn't threatening anything. He just wants her to consider the idea. We'll be back in a minute, too. But, first, let's go to the rest of this week's political side show. Is the pope in your fave five? Benedict XVI's American visit gave him a bounce in public approval polls here. This summer he'll follow up by reaching out to young Catholics. The pope will send inspirational words of wisdom via text messaging for Catholic world youth day. It is a lot faster of course than those illuminated manuscripts and you've got to know his service is great. Can you hear me now? Roses are red, violates are blue, plants have rights just like you. An ethics panel commissioned by the Swiss government has declared that it is morally wrong to arbitrarily kill a flower or plant. The panel was interpreting a new provision in the Swiss constitution, a provision it says protects all living organisms. What's next, felony charges for farmers? Finally, in a new poll, a third of young people say would be willing to devote their lives to public service if only someone would, well, ask them. The news would probably be more encouraging if they hadn't also overwhelmingly said their favorite public servant on TV is Joseph Fitzpatrick Fitzgerald Quimby -- yes, that's right, Diamond Joe Quimby, the mayor from the "Simpson's." We'll be right back.