t was the highest stakes speech of the campaign to date, and with it John McCain carved out a slot in our nation's political history, never mind what happens with election results.
By flying into Virginia Beach and challenging the big-money TV preachers of the religious right, as well as their big-money political pals in the GOP establishment, McCain laid bare the fault line between political conservatives and religious fundamentalists.
The old fighter pilot put the stick over, throttled to the redline, and screamed in low over the conservative heartland, firing off rockets, bullets, bombs, the works. He was never the kind of naval aviator to return to his carrier with unused ordnance. And by the time McCain finished strafing the command posts of the religious right Monday, both sides knew this was a battle to the finish. Either the Arizona senator crowbars the faithful and their votes away from the evangelical influence-peddlers - somewhere between one-sixth and one-third of Republican primary turnouts, depending on the state - or he flames out.
By taking dead aim on the influence of preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, by reading Bob Jones University out of the canon of acceptible political discourse, and by challenging fundamentalist voters to choose between their principles or their sheeplike fealty to the slickly coiffed merchants of televangelistic political palaver, McCain upped the ante. It's now a battle for the soul of the Republican Party, between McCain and his band of patriotic but secular conservatives, and the political preachers embraced by the faltering campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush.
Robertson's strident entry into the primary fight on Bush's behalf was a sort of fatwah against McCain, in which the television preacher castigated McCain and his followers as somehow ungodly. After doing a slow burn for weeks, McCain stunned the party with his rhetorical assault. Twenty-nine times, I counted on the C-Span tape, McCain's audience at a Virginia Beach high school gym erupted. The 63-year-old Arizonan laid down a withering assault on the ward-heelers who use Bible and brimstone to herd their flock into voting the way big-money shoves them.
Challenging the men he denounced as money-changers in the temple of government, as ''people who have turned good causes into businesses,'' McCain rallied his backers: ''America is greater than the accumulation of wealth - and so our party should be.'' But the Republican establishment he rails against are ''forces that have turned politics into a battle of bucks instead of a battle of ideas,'' he said.
Robertson, Falwell, and the antiabortion financiers who make a living culling money from the like-minded ''distort my prolife positions and smear the reputations of my supporters,'' McCain charged. ''Why? Because I don't pander to them, because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money is our message.'' The religious right has been coddled by Republican leaders since the Reagan success of 1980.
But not till Monday did any major GOP figure go this far: ''The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican party or in the name of America shame out faith, our party, and our country.''
McCain's speech will become a landmark. It surpasses in scope and gravity Bill Clinton's shrewd denunciation of Sister Souljah in 1992, after the black entertainer made intemperate remarks whites found objectionable. McCain's challenge ranks up there with Mario Cuomo's bearding the Roman Catholic antiabortion lobby in his 1984 Notre Dame speech after the Catholic bishops sided with Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale. And McCain's eloquence is of similar scale to Jack Kennedy's speech to the Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960, when he challenged the fundamentalists to accept his sophisticated elucidation of faith vs. patriotism.
As everyone is coming to understand, once McCain sets a course, he does not pull his punches. Surging in the affection of most categories of voters, save those of the orthodox Republicans, McCain tried to go over the heads of the establishment leaders who troop along behind the shadow of the Incredible Shrinking Texas Governor. Bush wanders between aimlessness and apology, wanly accusing McCain of religious bigotry after he himself was forced to apologize to Catholics for whomping up the rednecks at the retrograde Bob Jones University.
If you read no other political text this year, go to www.mccain2000.com and scan the contents of McCain's speech. Some passages will give liberals heartburn, where he denounces ''union bosses,'' or his pledge to sign into law if elected a ban on partial-birth abortion. But you don't have to buy all of the boilerplate insertions intended to placate the conservative activists to marvel at the derring-do of the challenge to the GOP.
The audience was hushed as McCain told of how a North Vietnamese prison guard used to sneak into his cell at night to release the torture ropes, enabling the badlyinjured POW to pass the night in some comfort. At dawn the guard would noiselessly return to retighten the ropes. One Christmas morning, the same guard slyly drew a cross in the dirt of the prison yard, letting McCain know he too was a Christian.
''That is my faith,'' concluded McCain, ''the faith that united and never divides, the faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. It is the faith I would die to defend.''
And it may yet turn out to be the faith that drives the televangelical money-changers from the temple of politics.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
