Brownback in 2008: The Economist takes a look.

The Economist devotes its "Lexington" section on America this week to a Senator whom the ultra-left love to malign as the most ignorant and backward of the presidential candidates the Republican Party might nominate in 2008. [Unless you consider Rick Santorum as a possibility!] They are both conservative Roman Catholics, so the unbelievers on the sinister side of the aisle and the MSM naturally regard these two as the ne plus ultra of right-wing extremism. The name of the Brownback article is called The Wilberforce Republican, after the famous British advocate of ending slavery and entitled "Sam Brownback is redefining the Christian right"

THESE days the closest thing that liberal America has to a civic religion is "tolerance". Emit the merest whiff of prejudice against Welsh-Americans or "the transgendered community" and you risk committing social suicide. Deliver a succession of windy speeches on the wonders of "diversity" and you are likely to end up as the president of an Ivy League university. However, as conservatives always point out, one group of people has been conspicuously exempted from this cult of tolerance: heart-on-the-sleeve Christians. In many of the more politically correct parts of America you can say anything you like about the God squad—dismiss them as poor, uneducated and easily led; ridicule their leaders as money-grubbing Neanderthals; hint that they spend most of their spare time dressed in white sheets—and you will still be welcomed in polite society.

Any liberal American who believes these stereotypes should spend some time studying an outside bet for the Republican nomination in 2008. Sam Brownback, the senior senator from Kansas, ticks all the right Christian-conservative boxes. He is strongly opposed to both gay marriage and abortion. He won his Senate seat back in 1996 by campaigning on the "three Rs"—reduce (the size of government), reform (Congress) and return (to traditional values). He hails from a state that liberals regard as embodying everything that has gone wrong with America. To cap it all, Pat Robertson regards him as "outstanding."

Yet the more you study Mr Brownback the more surprising he becomes. He may represent a landlocked state in the Midwest, but his biggest interest lies in foreign policy—and in particular in fusing diplomacy and humanitarianism. He is second-to-none in Congress in campaigning against the horrors that have been unfolding in Darfur in western Sudan, and in pleading the case for addressing HIV and malaria; he has been a relentless critic of the North Korean regime {"if hell is the absence of God," he once said, "I think you can see North Korea is the closest place to that on earth"); and he has sponsored legislation against sex trafficking. And these sermons are based on experience: he is a frequent visitor to some of the world's most troubled places, urging people to take their holidays (or "impact trips", as he calls them) in Rwanda rather than Europe.

Which is not to say that his compassion begins at the ocean's edge. Mr Brownback is a leading campaigner for reforming America's prisons, particularly the rehabilitation of ex-cons (he notes that faith-based programmes are much better at keeping prisoners on the straight and narrow because they are better at providing them with a support network when they leave). He helped sponsor a new museum of African-American history: now he wants an apology for Native Americans. Even some of his most “hard right” positions, such as his support for marriage, have a soft component: he produces reams of social science research about how marriage is "a leading poverty reducer."

Mr Brownback's politics is rooted in his religious faith. He was raised an evangelical Protestant, a son of Osawatomie, a longstanding hotbed of Kansas evangelism (and a centre of the abolitionist movement before the civil war). But a few years ago a brush with cancer changed his life, persuading him to put religion at the forefront of his political persona. He was particularly moved by reading a biography of William Wilberforce, a British anti-slavery agitator. He also became a Roman Catholic. He now attends two services every Sunday—mass and also one with his family, who remain evangelical Protestants.

Mr Brownback's enthusiasm for mixing God and politics has left him with lots of strange bedfellows. He co-sponsored legislation against sex trafficking with the late (and near socialist) Paul Wellstone and co-sponsored the North Korea Refugee Act with Ted Kennedy. He frequently rubs shoulders with feminists and black activists. Indeed, he is arguably today's champion of liberal internationalism, the baton having been passed from the Clintonites (who are now out of power) and from human-rights groups (who are divided over things like sex trafficking).

Mr Brownback is not the only "Wilberforce Republican." A growing number of people on the Christian right think that America's role in the world is to go out and slay dragons, whether they be in the form of religious persecution or prostitution. Plenty of young conservatives have turned their attention away from the domestic culture wars that their parents obsess about to more global issues like the environment and poverty.

What's gone right in Kansas?
All of which makes Mr Brownback an intriguing candidate for 2008. His political challenge will be how to avoid becoming a prisoner of the hardline Christian right—Mr Robertson et al might help him win a few primaries but doom him to marginalisation. Mr Brownback should be able to sidestep that trap. His enthusiasm for saving children in Darfur as well as fetuses in Kansas makes his social conservatism more acceptable to moderates (so does his mellifluous manner).

The bigger problem is that his compassionate foreign policy comes across as hopelessly naive. The neoconservatives' enthusiasm for spreading democracy in the Middle East is often lampooned nowadays, but at least they tried to link American idealism with American interests (in bringing peace and prosperity to the world's main source of both oil and terrorism). Mr Brownback's idealism is unconstrained by anything so vulgar as the national interest and power politics. Marvellous though it is to hear him denounce North Korea as hell on earth, presidents have to head off conflict with rogue states and advance America's trading interests. Americans are growing weary of a born-again president who wants merely to transform the Middle East. They will need a lot of convincing to back a man who wants to abolish suffering wherever he can find it.