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Panelists on Thursday's Focus on the Family broadcast (listen) had mixed reaction to Tuesday's election results, asserting both that "we didn't succeed," and that "our values were validated in this election."

The panelists, which included Focus chairman James Dobson, Focus vice president of public policy Tom Minnery, Focus analyst Carrie Gordon Earll, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, and FRC former president Gary Bauer, praised Democrats while savaging Republicans.

"Our good friend John Hostettler from Indiana lost to Brad Ellsworth, and Brad Ellsworth identified himself as pro-life, pro-gun, and anti-Pelosi," said Minnery. "Now, we're not necessarily pro-gun, but he identified himself as a social conservative. A gentleman running in North Carolina, Heath Shuler, ran openly as a born-again Christian as a Democrat. We're glad to see Christians emerging in the Democratic Party. There has been a growth of them. But they have to recognize, even if the Republicans do not, the value of values."

Minnery also quoted favorably from a recent speech from Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who has announced that he is considering a run for president. However, Minnery said, "He sounds like a social conservative. All it is so far is rhetoric. He doesn't vote according to these words."

Still, Minnery said, Democrats have "moved into the vacuum that the Republicans have left."

Perkins agreed. "The values that we care about," such as abortion and gay marriage, he said, "are issues that not just evangelicals care about, but more people in this society care about, even, as we've seen, the Democratic candidates running on those issues. … We can't shrink back now. Our values were validated in this election. We simply have to get people who will run for public office who openly share those views and will create policy reflective of those views."

Minnery named the faith-based initiative and the federal marriage amendment as two areas where Republicans in Congress failed to enact legislation. Dobson added "protecting religious liberty" and "spending wildly" as concerns.

Dobson singled out congressional leaders Arlen Specter and Dick Armey for criticism both on the air and in a press release issued Thursday morning, and said Specter and Armey were wrong to blame social conservatives for Tuesday's losses.

"If the Republicans are not going to support those principles, then somebody else is," Dobson said near the end of the broadcast. "We've been harder today on the Republicans than we are on the Democrats because in fact it's the Republicans who dropped the ball here."

Though the panelists repeatedly stressed that their allegiance was to issues rather than to the Republican Party, Minnery said, "Republicans had the ideas to solve our greatest challenge. If we focus on ideas, our majority status will take care of itself. They did not focus on ideas, and the majority became a minority."

Though Dobson repeatedly stressed that "values voters" saw victories Tuesday night, he was downcast.

"Tuesday night was terribly frustrating, not because Republicans went down to defeat. I think frankly, they deserved it. But because with it went a lot of moral issues, profamily issues, and things that the future of the country depends on," he said. "We did the best we could. We didn't succeed. But success is in God's hands, and faithfulness is what he expects of us. … I think we ought to let the Republican leadership know that if they want to change this outcome in two years, they'd better pay attention to their base, and their base is made up of values voters."

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November (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50