When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, an influential megachurch pastor from Texas made an early endorsement that helped him win over skeptical evangelical conservatives.
That pastor was the Rev. John C. Hagee.
At the time, Mr. Hagee was pretty much the same public person he is today: a hard-line pro-Israel preacher and best-selling author whose evangelistic enterprise was built on apocalyptic prophecies that many Jews, Roman Catholics and other Christians found disturbing. Yet it was never an issue when Mr. Bush’s campaign trumpeted the support of Mr. Hagee, as well as that of multimedia evangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
Eight years later, Mr. Hagee’s presidential endorsement is suddenly more a curse than a blessing.
On Thursday, four months after Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican candidate, stood next to Mr. Hagee at a news conference and announced how delighted he was to have his endorsement, Mr. McCain renounced it. He acted after a Web site released a recording of a sermon in which Mr. Hagee said Hitler and the Holocaust had been part of God’s plan to chase the Jews from Europe and drive them to Palestine.
Mr. McCain also rejected the endorsement of the Rev. Rod Parsley, an Ohio pastor who had been retooling his church into a get-out-the-vote machine for Republicans. The problem for Mr. McCain was that Mr. Parsley was vocally anti-Islam.
Presidential candidates have always had to vet their vice-presidential candidates, their consultants, their pollsters and their major donors. Campaign 2008 is proving that they also have to vet their members of the clergy.
It started with Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the leading Democratic candidate, who denounced his own former pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., after Mr. Wright aired his Afro-centric version of conspiracy thinking at the National Press Club.

nytimes.com


Tags: ,