Keeping the Faith
Evangelicals know what they want in a candidate. But the current crop may not have it.
Splits. Some heavyweights within the Council for National Policy and other conservative coalitions are weighing an effort to galvanize behind a socially conservative second-tier candidate, such as Huckabee or Brownback, in an attempt to catapult him into the top tier. "There is a very strong feeling that we have to assert ourselves or we're going to end up with somebody we can't support," says Paul Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist and cofounder of Moral Majority. Weyrich says Christian right leadership is currently split "around fifty-fifty" over whether to pursue such a plan or to adopt an every-man-for-himself approach, in which activists would gravitate toward the candidate of their choice.
A concerted attempt to steer evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic voters toward a second-tier candidate could hit Romney hardest. In reversing his support for abortion rights and gay rights, Romney's strategy is to convince right-wing Republicans leaning toward Huckabee or Brownback that he's the more viable candidate. (The plan presumes that McCain and Giuliani will fight for the votes of the Republican establishment.) "There's a big group of pragmatic social conservatives who don't want to waste their votes," says a Romney aide. "We're going to be the second choice of a lot of people who want to follow their hearts but want a strong candidate."
Of the three front-runners, Romney has been courting evangelical leaders most zealously. After a meeting at his Massachusetts home last fall with roughly 15 high-powered religious conservatives, Romney sent each attendee a wooden captain's chair mounted with a brass plaque that reads, "You are welcome at our table anytime." Because many evangelicals consider Romney's Mormonism to be a cult, he has the most to gain by winning over visible evangelical leaders. "If the person in the pulpit says [Mormonism] is a line you cannot cross, then you can't reach the person in the pew," says evangelical publicity executive Mark DeMoss, who organized the Massachusetts meeting. The courtship continued in February at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Orlando, where DeMoss introduced Romney to closed-door sessions of Christian right activists by saying: "I've found the answer to the question of whether you can support a Mormon: It depends on who the Mormon is."
Romney has picked up support among key evangelicals, including DeMoss and Jay Sekulow, who runs the Christian legal group American Center for Law and Justice, founded by Pat Robertson. Romney's campaign has also been assiduously courting Dobson, the nation's most politically powerful evangelical leader, who announced earlier that he couldn't support McCain or Giuliani. U.S. News has learned that Romney sat down with Dobson last week at Focus's Colorado Springs, Colo., headquarters for their first getting-to-know-you session. Christian right activists say that unless Romney can win his support, Dobson-who has not met with other presidential candidates at Focus HQ-is inclined to back a second-tier candidate.
Critics. Romney has suffered among social conservatives in recent months, as activists around the country have E-mailed to one another more than a dozen memos and news clips criticizing his gubernatorial record. Among other things, the memos allege that Romney appointed liberals to fill state court vacancies and that he failed to use his executive power to stop the distribution of marriage licenses to gay couples. The Romney campaign notes that his court appointees needed approval of Democratic officials and argues that an amendment to the state Constitution to ban gay marriage, which Romney backed, was preferable to a one-time executive injunction. But many conservatives remain skeptical. " If there's anything else [social conservatives] should know, he should let them know now," says Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, who stood with Romney last fall in Massachusetts to oppose the state Supreme Court's legalization of gay marriage.
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