FRC Finally Acting Helpful

First, the disclaimer: Under federal tax laws, the Family Research Council is forbidden from endorsing any candidate for political office or otherwise "intervening" in an election. But the reality is that nonprofits have become very sophisticated in influencing their particular audiences in political matters without stepping over the tax code's lines. The leftys even have an organization, Alliance for Justice, devoted to giving workshops and offering individualized legal advice to nonprofits to help them "get away" with as much political activity as possible while not jeopardizing their tax status. (I infiltrated their 2-day workshop a while back: extremely informative -- and maddening.)

So the Family Research Council / FRC Action really botched an opportunity back in October to help unite social conservatives behind one GOP candidate. After Mike Huckabee received more standing ovations than all of the other GOP candidates combined (and they all got ~20 minutes to speak to about 2,000 FRC members) at their Washington Briefing conference, FRC announced Mitt Romney the winner of their straw poll (by a hair over Huckabee), to stunned silence by the people who had actually attended the event. Quickly the true story leaked out: the Romney supporters had "stuffed" the online voting (which required "joining" FRC Action for $1), but Mike Huckabee had totally dominated the onsite voting, winning 51% of the vote, and Romney came in a very distant 2nd place with 10% of the onsite vote. Had FRC been forthcoming from the beginning about the results of much more reliable onsite voting, instead of issuing misleading press releases calling Romney the winner, this would have boosted Huckabee's status as the leader for social conservatives much more than the muddled reporting that actually occurred.

Well, FRC is now facing the prospect of the social conservatives getting left in the cold because of the 3-way split among the first three primaries. Now Tony Perkins' message on their blog is, we have to unite! He can't say which candidate to unite behind overtly, and he offers some complimentary points about each of Huckabee, McCain, Romney and Thompson, but today's blog entry does offer some subtle clues to readers about where the center of gravity ought to be:

• It criticizes Dick Armey and the Club for Growth for touring South Carolina, not to unite the party, but to attack Mike Huckabee. Also note that FRC has cast Dick Armey as the villian in multiple recent daily emails for trying to jettison the social conservatives and shove Rudy Giuliani down their throats. The implication is that Club for Growth is guilty by association and Mike Huckabee is the protagonist to slay the Armey dragon.
  
• Huckabee gets listed first among the candidates. Simple yet suggestive.
  
• The Blogroll on the right of the screen highlights 3 blogs, and then lists maybe a hundred more alphabetically. The top two featured blogs happen to be... prominent pro-Huckabee blogs! Evangelical Outpost, which has explicitly endorsed Huckabee, and Reasoned Audacity, belonging to Charmaine Yoest, who recently joined the Huckabee campaign as Senior Policy Adviser.

In other news, today's Rassmussen poll shows Huckabee overcoming last week's slippage in South Carolina and gaining 9 percentage points in one week to pull dead even with John McCain. I was getting a little worried and pessimistic the last few days about a McCain takeover, but things are looking promising as we head into the first in the South primary!