Pat Robertson was a senator's son from Lexington, Virginia, born to the Old South Democrat A. Willis Robertson. In the '50s, after he found Jesus, the future televangelist lived a little while in a Bedford-Stuyvesant commune that his wife called "the filthiest, ugliest, most germ-infested place I've ever been in." (It was next door to a church, and the Robertsons were there to minister to the poor.) When Pat got word that a bankrupt TV station was up for sale in Portsmouth, Virginia, he moved back south, bought the place, and in '61 became a broadcaster. Like Jerry Falwell, who had launched his Old-Time Gospel Hour in the same state five years earlier, Robertson mixed his old-time religion with a more modern showbiz spirit. (Early articles about The 700 Club constantly compared it to The Tonight Show.) Like Falwell, Robertson found that his TV ministry was both highly popular and highly profitable. And like Falwell, Robertson gradually got drawn into politics.
By 1987, Robertson was convinced that pressure groups like the Moral Majority and alternative media like The 700 Club weren't enough: To wield power, he would have to make a bid for the White House himself. And so he entered the race for the Republican nomination. He was the most socially conservative candidate in the field, a man who unapologetically favored legal restrictions on porn, adultery, and gay sex. (He did back down from his notion that "the only way to solve the recession and national debt" was to embrace the biblical Jubilee and cancel everyone's debts every 50 years.) He finished second in Iowa—ahead of the eventual nominee, George H.W Bush—and he won the caucuses in Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Washington state. In Michigan, the county conventions were so closely fought that Robertson's campaign manager nearly got into a fistfight with a pro-Bush legislator.
A quirky footnote to the race came after Robertson dropped out and endorsed Bush. At the GOP's national convention in New Orleans, some of those Robertson die-hards from Michigan—one of them fresh from a summer seminar at the Mises Institute—flirted with the idea of thumbing their nose at the Trilateralist atop the ticket and nominating a different candidate from the floor: Libertarian Party standard-bearer Ron Paul. Among the Libertarians, this potential alliance sparked a mix of enthusiasm and repulsion that foreshadowed the movement's future culture wars. Robertson himself dropped by the delegation to discourage the idea, and Paul eventually rejected a plan to slip him into the convention with a guest pass: He decided, American Libertarian's Greg Kaza reported, that this would be "a violation of property rights."