Chapter One
CAMPAIGN MODEI don't want to sound like a prophet here,
but we saw this coming.
James Dobson, on Your World
with Neil Cavuto, Fox News,
November 12, 2004
For James Dobson, the stakes on November 2, 2004-Election
Day-couldn't have been higher. The renowned child psychologist,
best-selling author, popular radio host, and founder of Focus
on the Family had devoted his entire life to the preservation of the family,
and now all he held dear seemed to be hanging in the balance. Although
he had rarely before campaigned in a way that could be
considered strictly partisan, this election year Dobson had become
convinced that he had no choice but to jump into the political fray with
both feet. And when he did, he determined to give all he had for the
cause.
By the time the 2004 campaign was over, Beltway heavyweights
from Tom Daschle to Arlen Specter, media pundits, Democratic operatives, Focus on the Family listeners, and Dr. Dobson readers from coast
to coast had gained a much better appreciation for who Dobson was
and what he could accomplish.
* * *
During the 2004 election season, Dobson was already in the midst of a
full slate of appearances at campaign rallies around the country when
pro-family groups in northwestern Iowa urgently summoned him: We
need you to come to Sioux City. In 2003, State Judge Jeffrey Neary had
approved a "divorce" for two Sioux City lesbians who were united in a
civil ceremony in Vermont. Iowa recognizes neither civil unions nor
gay marriages, and traditional-family advocates worried that Neary's
action set a back-door precedent for overturning the status quo in their
state. He was a married father of three children, served as a Boy Scout
leader, and delivered children's sermons at his church, but Neary
didn't back down after protests over his decree granting the dissolution.
So now, an ad hoc local organization called the Judicial Accountability
Center was trying to make Neary pay with his job in a retention
vote scheduled for November 2.
Dobson was weary from having crisscrossed the nation for several
speeches, and he was due for an important rally in Sioux Falls, South
Dakota, the next day. For someone who hoped to influence the election
of several U.S. senators, a wayward judge in an obscure precinct of the
Great Plains might not have seemed a worthy target. But the invitation
to Sioux City for October 2 was red meat because over the previous
year, Dobson had invested himself in a relentless effort to get Americans
to recognize judicial overreach and its ill effects. So after Dobson
agreed to target the bull's-eye on Neary, more than five thousand people
gathered for a rally at the Tyson Events Center in Sioux City, where
maintenance workers covered the hockey rink with plywood for the affair.
Just as he had in many of Dobson's other appearances during the
campaign season, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research
Council, preceded Dobson, exhorting the crowd to go to the polls in
November in defense of traditional family values. Then, Sioux City
Mayor David Ferris introduced Dobson to the crowd. Federal regulations
governing the political activities of charitable organizations restricted
any speaker at the event from overtly endorsing particular
candidates, but there was nothing to stop Dobson from issuing the criticism
he had come to deliver-and he didn't disappoint his hosts.
He started by berating a court system that he described as being led
by liberal judges who, seemingly determined to allow same-sex marriages,
are creating laws rather than interpreting them. He encouraged
the activist and the outraged among his audience to voice their opinions
by voting and "maybe find some of these people another line of
work Now judges are telling us they want to redefine the definition
of marriage!" he intoned from behind a cherry-wood podium, in a
steel-blue suit, his ruddy-blond pate intensely spotlighted against the
precisely engineered blackness of the rest of the arena. "We say, 'Not in
our lifetime!' I don't mean to be disrespectful," he continued over the
cheers, "but you've got one of [those judges] right here-Judge Jeffrey
Neary."
But while Dobson's message was similar, the logistics of his presentation
in Sioux City were different than at the rest of the rallies he led
during the campaign season. All of the others were organized by Family
Policy Councils, which are state level-affiliates of Focus-meaning that
Dobson could dictate conditions in the arena. He always preferred to
keep the house lights up during his addresses, so that he could see, read,
and draw from the reactions and energy of the crowds. But wanting to
ensure that their celebrity speaker could be clearly seen on the overhead
video screens by everyone at the large gathering, the independent
organizers of the Iowa affair had insisted on a thoroughly darkened
house. Reluctantly, Dobson had gone along.
He shouldn't have. After he finished his speech-pupils still dilated
after blinking into the spotlights for a half hour-Dobson turned to his
right and began to move at a wide angle, in a direct line to his chair. But
he couldn't see the stage, and Dobson had forgotten that the podium
was perched on a promontory perpendicular to the dais. There was no
guardrail to signal trouble, and the six-foot-two Dobson plummeted
off the edge of the six-foot-high stage as if into a pit. On his way down,
Dobson reflexively grabbed a potted plant that marked the edge of the
platform. His head could have hit the wood-covered concrete or struck
the large speaker boxes located below. But instead, at the last moment,
Dobson's lower leg caught on the edge of the stage as he was falling-flipping
him so that he landed on his side and back rather than his head.
The crowd gasped, and Dobson's wife, Shirley, and daughter,
Danae, rushed from their second-row seats to attend to Dobson, as did
about two dozen other people from the audience. By the time anyone
reached him, Dobson already had pushed himself up to a sitting position,
leaning on one of the speakers. Shirley got behind him and cradled
his head, and a doctor in the audience reached him seconds later. Blood
was pooling beneath him, so the doctor immediately checked for a
deep cut on Dobson's head. He quickly realized that it was Dobson's
leg that had been gashed in the fall, and it was bleeding profusely. But
soon, Dobson was hobbling the distance of about a block to the arena's
"green room," where speakers waited before taking the stage. After
about a half hour of emergency attention, family members and aides
took him to a hospital emergency room a few blocks away, where a
doctor used five stitches to close the nasty slice on his leg.
About two hours later, a patched-up Dobson, grateful that his pratfall
hadn't been much worse, boarded a private jet borrowed from a
Focus supporter and flew to his next rally in Sioux Falls. Later, Tom
Minnery, the Focus vice president of public policy who accompanied
his boss to Sioux City, reflected on the near catastrophe. "There he was
sitting in a pool of blood," mused Minnery. "I don't know a lot of people
who ended up giving blood for what happened on Election Day."
* * *
Ultimately, Dobson's sacrifice of blood and sweat, if not tears, paid off.
While political mastermind Karl Rove may have been the architect of
the reelection of President George W. Bush and of the Republican
surge in November 2004, James Dobson could very well be called the
construction foreman. Some commentators quickly argued that more
than any other single factor, it was Dobson's exhortation of evangelicals
and conservative Catholics to flock to the polls and vote their values
that informed and motivated their stunning turnout on Election Day.
And Dobson wasted little time in serving notice that he would act as a
fulcrum for judgment by believers on whether President Bush and
Congress were coming through for them during the new terms they
had been granted.
Election Day "was a battle not just for the selection of a president,"
Dobson said on his Focus on the Family radio show several days after the
November 2004 election. "It was a statement of who we are as a people
and what we will be in the future and what our children will value
and how they will see right and wrong. All of that was hanging in the
balance."
As soon as John F. Kerry finally conceded the presidential vote in
the late morning of November 3, Dobson completed an almost perfect
box score from the day before. There was Bush's win, of course, in
which "moral values" figured more significantly than any other specific
motivation, according to exit polls. New Republic editor Michael
Crowley supposed that "Dobson may have delivered Bush his victories
in Ohio and Florida." Bans on same-sex marriage-which Dobson had
identified as the single gravest threat to the American family-passed
comfortably to overwhelmingly in eleven of eleven states where they
were on the ballot.
Shocking the Beltway crowd, South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle
fell to evangelical Republican John Thune after Dobson had personally
targeted Daschle for obstructing the confirmation of Bush's judicial
nominees. Like-thinking Senate candidates in Louisiana, Oklahoma,
and North Carolina also rode Dobson's overt support to victories that
surprised many handicappers. Though Iowa Judge Neary was retained
by voters, his 59 percent of the ballot was significantly below the support
he had garnered in 2000. And even beer magnate Pete Coors lost
his Senate bid in Colorado, a defeat some attributed to Dobson's clear
lack of support.
The only blotch on Dobson's personal scorecard was California's
approval to issue a $3-billion state bond to fund embryonic stem-cell
research. At the eleventh hour, Dobson had allied with actor and conservative
Catholic Mel Gibson to put together a California-only radio
broadcast opposing the measure, but they weren't able to stop its
passage.
Dobson didn't waste any time, however, before he tried to leverage
his winning touch into a boost for what would be his most important
post-election issue: gaining the appointment of pro-lifers to the Supreme
Court. Just a day after the election, pro-abortion Republican Senator
Arlen Specter predicted trouble for any known pro-life nominees, and
Dobson and his allies immediately began trying to derail Specter's ascendance
to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Specter
survived the challenge, but only after days of backpedaling and making
unprecedented promises to Senate conservatives that he would help
Bush's nominees-pro-life or otherwise-get approval.
One person who wasn't surprised by Dobson's impact was Charles
Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship and a close confidant.
"Clearly, he played a major role in this election," Colson says. "More
than anyone else, he mobilized the evangelical base."
* * *
It took Dobson about twenty years to reach the point of exercising such
unvarnished partisanship and practicing such aggressive politicking. In
the eighties, he had veered from writing family-advice books and doing
his radio show into fulminating on public policy, but only when he felt
that legislators, judges, entertainers, and journalists had begun giving
up on and even trespassing on the traditional values he was trying to
protect. He served on federal commissions that addressed ills such as
pornography and gambling and developed the ability to overwhelm
Capitol Hill switchboards with his listeners' plaintive phone calls.
After spending much of the nineties unsuccessfully prodding the
GOP to join him in his concerns about eroding social values, Dobson
backed away from Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole in
1996, largely because of his mushy views on abortion. In 2000,
Dobson welcomed the pro-life and openly Christian George W. Bush
but did little to generate votes for him-and by Karl Rove's estimate,
about four million evangelicals stayed home, nearly costing Bush his
first term.
But four years later, events had transpired that propelled Dobson
onto the campaign terrain in an unprecedented way. For one thing, he
had more freedom than ever, having recently turned over the day-today
administration of Focus on the Family to Don Hodel. Dobson was
also feeling completely healthy again after battling some serious medical
problems over the previous two years. And finally, Dobson had been
able to free up more of Focus's resources from Internal Revenue Service
rules that restrict political advocacy by not-for-profit institutions.
Nevertheless, his decision to accelerate himself and Focus to the
next level of political involvement was a difficult one for Dobson. He
was well aware of how previous lunges into the political arena had tarnished
the ministries of others, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
And he well understood his friend Colson's staunch opposition to
partisan political involvement for figures like them. "I've always argued,"
Colson says, "that religious leaders should remain, not above
moral issues of course, but above partisan issues so that you don't make
the Christian movement hostage to one political party. Either that, or
they should step down from their Christian position, as Robertson did
when he gave up his ordination" to run for president in 1988.
Dobson widely acknowledged both his own hesitance to take this
step and the perils therein. "There are dangers [in becoming too partisan],"
Dobson said in a New York Times story in May 2004, "and that is
why I have never done it before. But the attack and assault on marriage
is so distressing that I just feel like I can't remain silent." Yet even as
late as a few days before the election, he was still telling the Times: "I
have been very reluctant to use my influence in the past, because if you
marry a politician, you could be a widow in four years."
But in the end, Dobson took the plunge. "His position, as he put it
to me," Colson says, "was that you don't live or die by elections, but if
ever there were a decisive election involving the future of the family,
this was it. I agreed with him on that and didn't try to discourage him,
because if he felt the freedom to do it and that it wasn't putting his ministry
in jeopardy, then he should do it."
Actually, Dobson sensed no freedom regarding the decision to
cross the great divide into partisanship and take Focus with him. Instead,
he felt absolutely compelled to do so, coming to believe that this
decision was at the same time a logical, necessary, and even divinely inspired
culmination of everything he had accomplished and everything
else he had strived for over the previous quarter century.
Dobson reached his moment of reckoning in August 2003, after
making the keynote speech at a rally outside the Alabama state judicial
center in Montgomery. The crowd was protesting a decision by a federal
judge to remove from public view a monument there called The
Ten Commandments, which had been commissioned by Judge Roy
Moore after he was elected the state's chief justice in 2000.
"When I saw what that [federal] judge was trying to do despite the
will of the people of Alabama and I participated in that rally, that's
where my determination to try to make a difference in the 2004 election
originated," says Dobson. "I saw the excitement of the people. I
saw how they longed for a voice and how frustrated they were by having
their views overridden by leftist judges and by the inability of the
Congress to get anything done to protect their values. It was an
exhilarating experience.
"While we were still in Montgomery, I said [to aides] that I have
tried to remain out of the political arena for twenty-six years, because I
didn't want to drag Focus into the mucky-muck of presidential elections
and all that that means. I had never endorsed a presidential candidate
in my life. But in Montgomery, I said that's got to change. For the
first time, I felt an obligation to do what I could through direct involvement
in an election. I didn't know what influence I could have, but I
was going to use whatever God had given me, because I simply couldn't
sit this one out."
Less than a month later, in a banquet hall at The Broadmoor resort
in Colorado Springs, Dobson gave the first clear public signal that he
had reached such a decision. He had been invited to deliver the keynote
address to the Council for National Policy, five years after he had prodded
the group with his speech accusing its powerful Republican members
of abandoning evangelicals.
(Continues.)
