Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer ended the night with a combative speech, telling attendees that they were Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare. He mocked the media for predicting the demise of the Religious Right. “I say to my reporter friends, we are only now beginning to fight. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
Bauer called terrorism “the central fact of our age," in what could be seen as an appeal for voters not to abandon Giuliani if he is the GOP nominee. He left people with a troubling image of Homeland Security vans driving around U.S. neighborhoods every night scanning for radiation to try to prevent the destruction of an American city by dirty bomb. But, he warned, “Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stands guard in vain. Unless the United States rediscovers the God of Abraham…we are in trouble.”
He decried the “militant atheism” that is trying to pull America away from God, but urged people to take heart, because, “there are millions of Americans like you who are prepared to stand up and defend without embarrassment our values and when we do that we are going to prevail.”
Bauer also took on Bush for suggesting recently that Muslims prayed to the same God as Christians, and he took on MoveOn.org, the Right’s favorite target of late, asserting that liberals call U.S. troops Nazis, fascists, and Gestapo, and insisted that any politician of either party that is not willing to disavow MoveOn.org and other liberal groups “does not deserve to hold office in the United States.”
Bauer also took on directly the dispute within the Religious Right that has erupted over the threat by Dobson and others to support a third party candidate. Bauer called that strategy “political suicide.” Bauer ended by wrapping himself and the Religious Right movement in the mantle of the passengers on Flight 93 who battled their hijackers. He called those passengers “the first Americans who decided to meet the enemy head on” and said if they could do that, “we can find the courage and strength to go out and make the case for these values.”
