Social Issues Bubbling Up in GOP Campaign

Three weeks before Iowa’s leadoff caucuses, cultural issues that have been virtually dormant in this Republican presidential campaign are bursting to the forefront as social conservatives — who make up the core of GOP primary voters and haven’t rallied behind any one contender — search for a candidate who shares their views.

“Everyone knows what Iowans want to hear and they will be willing to say those things,” said the Rev. Brad Cranston of Burlington, who is backing Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann. “But I think it’s important that we examine their records.”

Almost daily now, GOP front-runners Gingrich and Romney are answering for records and backgrounds that are flawed in the eyes of these voters. And Republicans rivals looking to revive their struggling campaigns — like Perry — are turning ever more to topics that resonate strongly with this powerful segment of their party’s primary electorate in hopes of becoming their preferred candidate.

“There’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school,” Perry, the Texas governor, says in a TV ad blanketing Iowa ahead of the state’s Jan. 3 caucuses.

In a column published Tuesday, Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, assailed Perry for using gay and lesbian soldiers as “as political cannon fodder for his campaign” in “an attempt to garner conservative Christian votes.”

Abortion opposition will be the issue of the day Wednesday, when Gingrich, Bachmann, Perry and Rick Santorum attend a screening of Mike Huckabee’s anti-abortion documentary.

Cultural issues like those — typically a driving force in a GOP primary — largely have taken a back seat to the economy this year, among even the most vocal social conservatives. Many have spent the better part of the year that while they want a candidate who firmly shares their beliefs, it’s most important that they find someone who can fix the economy — and defeat President Barack Obama.

A recent New York Times/ CBS News poll found that among evangelicals in Iowa, 55 percent said a candidate’s positions on economic issues were most important to them. Only 25 percent said social issues were their top priority. It was even more lopsided among all likely caucus-goers: 71 percent said the economy was issue one and 14 percent cited social concerns.

Today, the two Republicans at the top of polls in Iowa and elsewhere have baggage that makes cultural conservatives skeptical.