I’ve been meaning to post this for several weeks, since my colleagues Republius and DaveG both brought it up tonight, I figured would post on the 1994 conversion of Sam Brownback from moderate Republicanism to social conservatism. Last month the New Republic had an excellent cover story on Sam Brownback. Since I think it requires a subscription to read, I’ll quote the relevant (but extremely lengthy) parts of the article. You should all take the time to read it:

Brownback, by contrast, is closing in on a decade as the leading social conservative in the U.S. Senate. He has impeccable credentials on issues like judges, abortion, and gay marriage. (And, for that matter, any combination of the three: He has threatened to hold up the nomination of a Michigan judge because she once attended a lesbian commitment ceremony.) And Brownback’s leadership of the VAT gives him extraordinary day-to-day influence over the Senate’s social conservative agenda.

There are crasser considerations, too. Brownback was an evangelical Christian before he converted to Catholicism. Iowa has large populations of both. Brownback’s home in Topeka is a four-hour drive from Des Moines, giving him as close to a natural foothold in the state as any GOP contender will have. And, as a long-serving state agriculture secretary and former Future Farmers of America official, Brownback is as fluent in the language of ethanol subsidies and biodiesel production as any politician reared outside Iowa. Put this together, and you have a guy who could theoretically take one of the top two spots in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. With the Internet’s track record of making juggernauts out of grassroots icons, even a third-place finish could give Brownback an E-Z Pass lane straight through to the final stages of the race. If everything breaks right, and social conservatives are particularly aggrieved over their party’s standard bearer, Brownback could end up on the national ticket.

Brownback, in other words, is on the brink. He is savvy. He is righteous. He is committed. He would appear to have been born for this moment in politics. But looks can be deceiving, because birth is not at all how Brownback came by his place in the conservative cosmos. As recently as 1994, the year of his first campaign for Congress, Brownback was a member in good standing of the moderate Republican establishment. But, by the time he arrived in Congress that fall, he was emitting so much anti-government zeal he gave Newt Gingrich the willies. Within two years, Brownback had another epiphany, from which he emerged as a crusader for Christian causes.

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Up until 1991, Kansans for Life (KFL) had mostly restricted its activism to “citizen lobbying”: They would show up in Topeka and buttonhole their representatives. But, despite the group’s growing strength, passing legislation proved futile. “The leadership would always make promises, and then nothing happened,” recalls Golba, the organization’s then-president. That’s when Golba realized it would be easier to change the politicians than to change the policies. He hired a savvy former legislator named David Miller to organize his ground troops and placed moderate Republicans in his crosshairs. The plan succeeded beyond all expectations. In 1992, KFL stunned the local political establishment by electing ten conservative representatives. One of the new state reps, a carpet-layer named Jene Vickrey, upset the speaker of the Kansas House.

Brownback’s opponent, Bennie, was about as pro-life as you could get without earning yourself a restraining order. He had no trouble winning the KFL endorsement. This, in turn, formed the backbone of his campaign strategy. In every tiny Kansas town Bennie rolled into, dozens of KFL activists would turn up: 25 people in Erie (population 1,200); 50 in Burlington (population 2,700)–all of them to see a no-name with no chance of winning. After Bennie charged through his stump speech, the activists would fan out along the local streets, distributing literature and planting yard signs. It was like having a political operation thousands of workers strong.

From Brownback’s perspective, it was also a nightmare. Before the congressional race, Brownback had never really had to justify his abortion views. Now he was getting an earful practically every time he stumped for a vote. There were days when it looked like the whole thing might slip away.

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When Brownback arrived in the Senate, he sought a meeting with Chuck Colson, the Watergate felon turned born-again Christian. Officially, Colson ran the Prison Fellowship Ministries, an evangelical group that ministered to prisoners. Unofficially, he was the dean of the growing compassionate conservative movement. Brownback told Colson he wanted to put the “positive side” of his Christian faith to work in the Senate. The two men talked at length about how that might happen. Eventually, Colson mentioned William Wilberforce, the devoutly Christian English parliamentarian who had spearheaded the country’s anti-slavery movement during the late eighteenth century. Colson encouraged Brownback to adopt Wilberforce as his model of Christian praxis.

Brownback began to read. Religiously. He devoured biographies of Wilberforce. Aides noticed how the boss would carry a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters everywhere he traveled. He delved into Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s writings on politics and culture. People who knew Brownback during this time talk of metaphysical change. “I’ve had a sense that his faith has gotten stronger every year he’s been in Congress,” says former Democratic Representative Tony Hall, who regularly prayed with Brownback. Colson describes it as a “spiritual maturing.”

The coup de grâce came later that year. At the time, Brownback was serving as chairman of the subcommittee that oversees Washington, D.C. David Kensinger, Brownback’s longtime campaign manager and political Svengali, remembers when he and the senator noticed that the number of abortions in the District consistently rivaled the number of live births and that the vast majority of these mothers were unmarried. A little algebra revealed that only one in every six pregnancies ended with a married woman bringing a child to term. It was a jaw-dropping statistic. “You can do the flat tax, you can do school choice,” says Kensinger. “But until you fix that, you’re not going to fix what’s wrong with D.C.”

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But, by the end of the primary, Brownback had started to generate favorable chatter in Smith’s circles. She decided to meet him in person. Smith watched the way Brownback treated his family. She grilled his longtime scheduler about what he was like to work for. And, most important of all, she opened a long, anguished dialogue with him on abortion. Smith told Brownback how, back in the mid-’70s, she had terminated a six-week-old pregnancy. She was 19 and didn’t have a high school diploma or marketable skills. She showed up at a Planned Parenthood clinic with dozens of questions, only to be given what she says was a “high-pressure sales job,” to which she acceded. “It was the most devastating decision I have ever made,” she wrote me.

Brownback was shocked to hear that abortion was so prevalent, that a 14-year-old girl could have an abortion without her parents knowing, and that the procedure was legal up to the minute of birth (which is not, in fact, true). He had never even heard of a technique called partial-birth abortion. After a few weeks of this, Smith got in touch with Golba and the other leaders of the local pro-life movement. She told them that Brownback had become an ally in their cause. She felt so strongly about this, she said, that she was ready to vouch for him personally.

By the time Brownback and Golba met again, it was obvious that he had changed. Brownback had been a mild-mannered Methodist at the outset of the campaign. Now, as a result of his conversations with Smith and Robert Tyson (Brownback’s former Sunday school teacher), he had begun to opine on the abortion issue with a religious sense of purpose. “His talk was completely different,” says Golba. “We felt an honesty. … I could tell he knew the issue; he had studied it. We felt that’s where his heart was.”

A few years later, Brownback’s old primary opponent, Bob Bennie, received an invitation to a breakfast in Omaha, Nebraska, featuring a local gubernatorial candidate. A Christian men’s organization had sponsored the event, and Bennie–who had since relocated to nearby Lincoln–was just “filling a seat at a table.” Then he realized he knew the keynote speaker: Sam Brownback. Brownback’s remarks were unusually personal–really more of a testimonial than a speech. He talked largely about the spiritual change he’d undergone during his first congressional campaign. Bennie had been livid over what he’d seen as Brownback’s insincere positioning on abortion. But at the breakfast, he told me, it was obvious that “he’d had a change of heart in the way he thought about things.” When Brownback finished, Bennie stood off to the side as the other men filed by. Finally the senator turned and recognized him. “Bob,” he said, holding out his hand. But Bennie wasn’t in a handshaking mood. He walked up to Brownback and the two men embraced.

What does everyone think?