UK: Romney, the candidate of the evangelical party

PJ:  As Mr. Romney embraces the far right fringe, he's other more moderate self is all but a ghost.  As John Avlon writes in The Daily Beast today:  

"It is a remarkable achievement—he is not just the first non-Protestant to capture the evangelical party’s nomination, but a formerly moderate governor of Massachusetts whose signature achievement was health-care reform will lead the Tea Party insurgency of 2010 into a presidential election."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/30/mitt-romney-s-stockholm-syndrome-behavior.html 

The Economist
Lexington

Moral quandary

Mitt Romney wants to talk about the economy, not social issues. It isn’t working out that way

May 26th 2012 | from the print edition

IN MANY respects, Mitt Romney makes a perfect spokesman for America’s religious right. He certainly looks the part: his clothes crisply creased, his hair neatly gelled, his face habitually frozen in a look of square-jawed conviction. His personal life seems blameless. He is a regular churchgoer, and appears to live by the tenets of his faith. He married his high-school sweetheart, who bore him five strapping sons, who in turn have provided him with 18 grandchildren. He is a teetotaller, but not, like George W. Bush, as a break with the waywardness of his youth. Mr Romney spent much of his youth as a missionary, trying to persuade the French to give up wine. He once told a reporter that his greatest failing was that he devoted only one day a week to helping the needy (smugness is clearly a bit of an issue, too). The closest he has come to a scandal is the revelation that in his teens he once forcibly cut the hair of one of his schoolmates, in a prank that strayed across the line into bullying.

Yet Mr Romney does not like to talk about his faith in any but the broadest terms, presumably to avoid reminding voters that he is Mormon, a religion that many Americans find peculiar and some doctrinaire Christians consider heretical. Observers, trying to make sense of his inconsistent stances on abortion, gay marriage and the like, often assume that he is simply feigning abhorrence of them to curry favour with religious voters. But it is just as plausible that he faked the more tolerant views he used to espouse to curry favour with the liberal voters of Massachusetts, where he ran unsuccessfully for Senate and successfully for governor. At any rate, as a church leader Mr Romney is said to have encouraged women to favour child-rearing over their careers and to have discouraged them from having abortions.

It is ironic, then, that even when “social issues” dominate the news, Mr Romney says almost nothing about them. For weeks the media have been parsing and probing Barack Obama’s recent decision to endorse gay marriage. Yet Mr Romney simply reiterated his opposition to it before attempting to change the subject.
This is part of the natural rhythm of a presidential election. Candidates tend to play to the base of their party during the primaries, only to quench the fire and brimstone once they have secured the nomination, the better to appeal to swing voters. But it is also a reversal of sorts. Republican strategists used to assume that social issues were a vote-winner for them; now they seem to worry that too much righteous talk will put off centrists by making the party seem unpalatably moralising. Very few Americans rate gay marriage as the most pressing issue of the day, and those that do have surely long ago decided how they will vote; opponents for Mr Romney, and supporters for Mr Obama.

Much the same goes for other subjects that rile the conservative faithful. Mr Romney suddenly seems to have few thoughts about illegal immigration, global warming or activist judges. Instead, he devotes himself almost exclusively to talk of the economy, with the odd jab at Mr Obama’s health-care reforms. That, after all, is what swing voters care most about, and the area in which they are most unhappy with the president’s performance.

It’s not just the economy, stupid

The hitch is that “pivoting to the centre”, as the election jargon has it, is an especially awkward manoeuvre for Mr Romney. For one thing, the Republican faithful have always worried that the real Mr Romney is the relative liberal of his two races in Massachusetts, and that the present ardent conservative is the impostor. To allay their fears, Mr Romney must pivot more slowly and less far than he otherwise might. Thus when his appointment of an openly gay spokesman on foreign affairs caused a stir in conservative circles, the campaign quickly fired him.

Try as he might, Mr Romney will find it almost impossible to get away from social issues over the next five months. Mr Obama, after all, is doing his best to avoid dwelling on the weakness of the economy. His campaign has, instead, spent the past week trying to stir up indignation about a Republican electioneering outfit that seems to have considered (but decided against) running an ad campaign about Mr Obama’s ties to Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of a church the president used to attend and whose many racist, paranoid and unpatriotic utterances caused him great embarrassment during the 2008 campaign. That ploy forced Mr Romney to spend several days denying that he intended to bring up divisive racial issues, instead of hammering away at the president’s stewardship of the economy.

Mr Obama will be abetted in such diversions by those same Republicans who doubt Mr Romney’s conservative bona fides. They are constantly cooking up new schemes to promote their notion of personal rectitude, in spite of the damage it does to the party’s brand, especially among swinging (in both senses) single women. Last week, for example, Republicans in Virginia’s House failed to approve the appointment of a judge whose sole disqualification seemed to be that he was gay. Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, are trying to restrict access to abortion in Washington, DC, a city none of them represents. And several states will hold referendums on gay marriage on election day.

What is more, dogmatic legislators are not the only troublesome Republican voices. Anyone with a gripe and a fortune can now weigh in on the election via a “super PAC”, a new sort of campaign group that can raise and spend as much as it wants on advertisements as long as it does not have any formal ties to a party or candidate. It was thanks to a super PAC that Mr Wright found himself in the news again, for example. Others have sprung up to fight abortion and gay marriage. Whatever the impact on Mr Romney’s fortunes, in short, the religious right shows no inclination to let him run the election campaign he wants.
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http://www.economist.com/node/21555905