What’s Next?
McCain appears to be getting serious about Veep selection and Romney is high atop the list. (What? No Huckabee? NO SURPRISE.) So the punditry is full of evaluations. Here is Jonathan Martin’s and here’s a bit of a WSJ survey of commentary. The words “religion” and “Mormon” appear nowhere in any of this? I don’t think there was a single evaluation of Romney’s chances for the #1 slot that did not mention it.
(Lowell interjects: Well, Jonathan Martin does mention it in passing among the “cons” of selecting Romney:
Yet for all his energy, Romney demonstrated trouble connecting with voters during the primary. His Mormonism was plainly a problem among some religious conservatives.
So the punditry is not ignoring The Question just yet.)
Questions: Is this because the Veep slot just is not that serious? Did the primary campaign create an inoculation effect? Would it not have been a serious issue in the primary absent Huckabee? Will we hear from Evangelical leaders over the weekend? Will anyone make something out of the proximate location of McCain’s weekend place to the Jello Belt?
If Romney is selected, more questions: Will The Question arise at a serious level? Who will raise it? There is little love between McCain and Evangelicals, though there appears to be resigned toleration at this point. Would this cause Evangelicals to sit this one out? How could Romney best be deployed in the campaign? What will we hear first “Mormon” or “black liberation theology”? Who will be the first to charge a potential Mormon assassination plot to gain the presidency? (Oh, it will happen somewhere in the deep ugly bowels of the Internet . . . .)
It could be an interesting long weekend. We’ll post if something breaks, otherwise, enjoy the weekend. We have turned off comment screening so our faithful readers can contemplate these questions and many more.
Oh Yeah…
There were a couple of interesting religion and politics articles yesterday. This one on the California Supreme Court gay marriage decision and this one on an IRS ruling.
Sphere: Related Content
Posted in Candidate Qualifications, Electability, Miscellany, Political Strategy | 3 Comments » | 
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3 Responses to “What’s Next?”
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Swertfeger on 22 May 2008 at 9:09 am #
The Alliance Defense Fund defended the Pastor against the IRS? I thought the ADF was a good guy. If the ADF is really serious about defending religious freedom they would be well advised to help keep politics out of the pulpit.
coltakashi on 22 May 2008 at 3:28 pm #
In assessing the chances of a McCain-Romney ticket in the South, one should not forget that the primary elections in most of those states were three and four way contests, in which Huckabee’s pluralities were generally not majorities. The people who voted for McCain+the people who voted for Romney generally would constitute a majority of Republican voters.
People in the blogosphere also tend to focus so heavily on the East that they discount the West, a region where Romney was seriously dominant in the primaries, with voter totals that exceeded all other candidates put together. Romney is known in the West because of his leadership of the 2002 Olympics. People out here know his character and intelligence as well as his modesty.
He’s the kind of guy who, when his car was stuck in traffic en route to an Olympic venue, got out to see what was causing the problem, gave some direction to fix it, and then stood in the road and directed traffic to help other people see the competitions they had bought tickets for. He prevailed against the Europeanizing attitudes of the International Olympic Committee so that the flag recovered from the World Trade Center could be honored at the opening ceremonies. In its biographical series on Romney, the Boston Globe recounted that Romney shut down his company and took all of its employees to New York to search for the missing daughter of one of his partners, who was found through their efforts (not those of the police) suffering from what would otherwise have been a deadly drug overdose. Even though Huckabee bragged about being a “Christian leader”, Romney devoted many hours of his personal time every week for over five years as the unpaid leader of his church in the Boston area, ministering to the spiritual, emotional and financial needs of the hundreds of ethnically diverse people under his care, including immigrants from Haiti, who felt comfortable with him because he spoke their native French.
No one in the opinion mill seems to ask the question why McCain, an actual Arizona senator, is not a “favorite son” for the rest of the West, but the fact is that many of the issues in which McCain is the maverick so admired at times by the Mainstream Media are precisely issues where he has parted company with the viewpoint of many Westerners. Romney’s political philosophy is much more aligned with the West, even though he lived there only a few years as a college student and during his work for the Olympics.
pj on 26 May 2008 at 7:51 am #
Huckabee was invited to the McCain ranch for this weekend but declined as he had a previous engagement. He went on an cruise with his wife.
Rumor is that this was the weekend for all the guys who won’t get the nod! Yay!