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Michael Scanlon: How to "bring out the wackos"
Here's something that should at least temporarily replace "poor, uneducated, and easy to command" as the most outrageous characterization of conservative Christians.

Salon.com reports from the U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearings on the practices of lobbyists Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Michael Scanlon.

Weblog doesn't have time to go into all the details of the investigation here. If you need a background briefing, Wikipedia has a pretty good one. What Weblog is more interested in is how sure Scanlon (and presumably the others, including former Christian Coalition president Reed) were that they could convince conservative Christians that they were opposing gambling by protecting gambling interests.

Indian tribes wanted their casinos protected from competition, such as state lotteries and casinos on other tribes' land. So the lobbyists decided to mobilize Christians against the proposals to expand local gambling.

Here's Salon's Michael Scherer:

Consider one memo highlighted in a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday that Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, sent the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to describe his strategy for protecting the tribe's gambling business. In plain terms, Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: Target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives. …

The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious "wackos" could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.

The use of the term "wackos" was Scanlon's, not Salon's. Here's what he wrote (it's on p. 119 of this massive file):

We plan to use three forms of communications to mobilize and win these battles. … Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out AGAINST something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees. [bold added]

That's not the only interesting document in that huge file released by the Indian Affairs Committee. The e-mails from Reed to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are interesting, too.

What's particularly interesting about all this is that Christian voters probably could have been mobilized against expanding gambling in the South without all the deception that these records detail. There's a long tradition of opposing expansion of problematic businesses while not getting too upset over existing businesses. They might have even been happy to make common cause with the Coushatta Tribe against the expansion. Certainly they would have mobilized to oppose the expansion of gambling without the use of all the gambling money that went into the Abramoff efforts.

But that's the whole point: For Abramoff, Scanlon, Reed, and the others involved, the intent apparently wasn't to fight off expanded gambling. It was to get as much money as they could from these tribes.

If you feel bad being called a wacko, remember: Abramoff called the Indians "monkeys," "troglodytes," and "idiots."

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November (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49