The results are so strange that PPP’s Tom Jensen doesn’t have a theory. One possible explanation, though, is how health care has dominated the national political debate since early summer. It the spring, Romney bounced as high as 67 percent. The summer and fall have taken a toll on him. As Andy Barr astutely pointed out in September, Romney has been hamstrung by his health care record. As governor of Massachusetts, he compromised with Democrats and signed a mandate-driven health care bill, and ever since then Republicans have used that against him.

Inside the beltway, Romney is seen as a classic front-runner who’s picked his issues wisely–he’s four months away from publishing a book on “American greatness”–and retained smart campaign staffers. But Huckabee is leading the field in national and Iowa polls, and Palin clearly has the biggest following of any possible 2012 candidate.

This shouldn’t be surprising. In his two successful bids for governor, Pawlenty has received 46 percent and 47 percent of the vote. The reason? Minnesota’s Independence Party, which elected Gov. Jesse Ventura in 1998 but usually acts as a spoiler, typically for the Democrats. And since edging toward a presidential bid, Pawlenty has made hard rhetorical shifts to the right — such as suggesting that health care reform might be unconstitutional — that have been ripped apart in state newspapers. In this, Pawlenty is similar to Mitt Romney — a success in his own state who would not be able to carry it after tacking hard right to become the GOP nominee.

[Brig. Gen. Mark T. Kimmitt, USA (Ret.)] said that “the support of the American people is the center of gravity for the next ten years” — a interesting indication of how long he believes the U.S. will be involved in Afghanistan. Asked about possible frustration on the part of the military with the amount of time being taken by the Obama administration to decide on a new strategy, Gen. Kimmitt defended the pace of the administration’s decision-making process.

Sam Stein reports that former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.), a likely 2012 presidential candidate who can be counted on to say the most politically opportunistic, disagreed with Kimmitt and characterized the Obama administration’s deliberation as “Hamlet in the White House,” its overall policy stemming “from the sense that is growing in a lot of foreign policy circles that America is in decline.”

No real surprises are coming out of the conference. But FPI was created, almost expressly, to be a loyal opposition group bucking up the administration on the war in Afghanistan as the popular of that war slackens. The sudden arrival of predictable liberal-bashing seems to be swallowing up the message.

“Lately,” said Perry, “I’ve found myself going back to a book that’s titled ‘The 5000 Year Leap.’”

There were head nods and noises of approval from many members of the audience. That book, written by the late ultra-conservative scholar-cum-conspiracy theorists Cleon Skousen, had been rescued from 28 years of obscurity by Glenn Beck. Perry gave an accurate summary of its content, telling the audiences that Skousen “shares his views of the foundational elements of our nation, placing a special emphasis in faith in God–I think undeniably a source of America’s remarkable success. He asserts that natural law, God’s law, is the basis of our nation’s laws.”

It’s worth pointing out how surprising this is.

Skousen, as Alexander Zaitchek wrote last week, was a scholar-turned-conspiracy theorist whose “The 5,000 Year Leap” re-packages Mormon ethics into an argument that the founding fathers were inspired by 28 “fundamental” and divine beliefs in the creation of America.

Perry’s comments reminded me of a forgotten moment from the 2008 campaign, when Mitt Romney got into a heated exchange with a radio host who had theological objections to Mormonism. A grainy video of that exchange is here.

“Cleon Skousen has a book called ‘A Thousand Years,’” said Romney, arguing against the rumor that he believed the Second Coming would happen in Missouri. “Christ appears, it’s throughout the Bible, Christ appears in Jerusalem, splits the Mount of Olives to stop the war that’s coming to kill all the Jews. Our church believes that.”

It’s strange to hear prominent national Republicans telling people to read Skousen. Here’s a short video introduction to the man.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

Values Voter Summit 2009 (Photo by: David Weigel)

As the fourth annual Values Voter Summit wound down, Benjamin Paulding found a seat near the lobby to relax and reflect. An 18-year-old student who was studying accounting at an online university, he had arrived under a cloud. He was leaving in a much better mood.

“I had been thinking that unless God turns something around, the nation was doomed,” said Paulding. “I think our doom is delayed now, because America is awakening. We woke up late, but we’re going to able to make a difference now.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Paulding’s new optimism wasn’t limited to the way Americans might turn against abortion or against gay marriage, even though multiple speakers at the two-day conference (a third day was limited to a morning worship session) had deployed deceptively positive poll numbers to argue that most voters now agreed that “abortion is immoral” or that same-sex marriage should remain illegal. He was increasingly convinced that his country was ready to turn away from the economic policies of President Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats.

“Taxes are going to end up going up, especially if the health care bill passes,” said Paulding. “And all the debt–if you do the math it would cost $438,000 for each household to pay off the debt right now,” he said, quoting a number he’d researched on his own.

Paulding’s worries were reflected throughout the summit, in the halls and in the speeches from the main stage. While the second day of the conference was given over to more overtly social conservative causes than the first, from activists who demanded the “defunding” of Planned Parenthood, campaigning to ban gay marriage, and working in general to “save” the hearts and minds of fellow Americans, it also cemented a move toward economic and constitutional worries. Attendee after attendee told TWI that the size of the national debt and what they perceived as an abandonment of the Constitution’s original intent were worrying them as much as the assault on their values.

“For the Christian right, this needed to happen,” said Jamie Johnson, an Iowa activist who runs the conservative Faith and Freedom Network in that state, and who fell short in a 2008 bid for local office. “The shock of having a far-left president has awakened many who only thought about two issues.” Those issues had been gay rights and abortion. “They realize now that the founding fathers cared about many issues related to liberty and security and prosperity.”

“It started when Bush was still president,” said Johnson’s father Fred, attending the conference with him for the second consecutive year. “Most of us common people were thinking, ‘We play by the rules, and we provide for our families, and we have to bail out these folks because they were irresponsible?’”

The merger of mainstream Republican Party rhetoric and the priorities of “Christian right” activists happened naturally for people like Johnson and Paulding. It was also politically astute for a wing of the conservative movement that had, in recent years, become somewhat toxic. In a bland speech notable for its sudden embrace of economic populism, former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) told the crowd that “just across the river, the signs are good that we’re about to see a low tax, pro-growth, pro-life government of Virginia.” He was referring to Robert McDonnell, a former Virginia attorney general whose commanding position in the off-year gubernatorial election has been endangered since The Washington Post reported on a 1989 thesis about a possible ultraconservative “family agenda” which McDonnell handed into Pat Robertson’s Regent University. Hours after Romney spoke, the newspaper released a poll showing McDonnell’s poll lead slipping from 15 points to four points.

Romney’s speech did not exactly electrify the Summit. Unlike most of the politicians who appeared before the respectful crowd, he used a TelePrompTer–its presence in the Saturday morning session inspired barbs from Family Research Council emcee Gil Mertz and Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), both of whom joked that the speech-making technology must have been there for President Obama. (Obama’s alleged inability to speak without a text is a popular conservative meme.) An unscientific straw poll of attendees found only 12.4 percent of them favoring a Romney nomination in 2012, less than half of the support found for former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-Ark.).

But if Romney didn’t have his “finger on the pulse” of Values Voters–as FRC’s Tony Perkins said of Huckabee–he got close the model for their rhetoric and political agenda. The overarching problem with the Obama administration, Romney argued, was that “big government activists” were “substitut[ing] their ideology for the wisdom and good sense of the American people.”

Even the activists who focused on the movement’s social agenda found their way to that argument. Lila Rose, a 21-year-old anti-abortion rights activist who has become famous in the movement for undercover exposes of Planned Parenthood clinics, dazzled the crowd with a terrifying, searching vision of how Americans could be turned against the practice. “This might sound a little strange,” said Rose, “but if I could insist, as long as they are legal in our nation, abortions would be done in the public square, until we were so sick of seeing them that we would do away with the injustice altogether. Maybe then we would value the unborn child as much as we value the one-year-old child who is just beginning to walk. Maybe then, we would hear angels singing, as we ponder the glory of human life.”

That was Rose’s emotional appeal. Her agenda, however, was all about taxation and government funding. She singled out, as the greatest achievement possibly brought about by her work, a move by the Tennessee state legislature to direct $1.1 million away from abortion providers. “Planned Parenthood,” said Rose, “you will be de-funded.” It evoked the good feelings that came from the recent de-funding of ACORN, and it brought out bursts of applause.

The economic appeal trickled down from the main stage, where every word was recorded by a bevy of cameras and tape recorders, and into the more obscure breakout sessions that closed the non-VIP portion of the summit. A session on the “New Masculinity” went deep into the reasons why, and how, conservatives could prevent children from entering pre-marital domestic partnerships or from embracing the “malady” of homosexuality. Michael Schwartz, the chief of staff to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), told the audience that praising one’s parents in nightly prayers could enforce the notion of marriage, and telling children that “all pornography is homosexual pornography” could prevent them from becoming perverted. The point, however, was that welfare and government acceptance of homosexuality were costing America its prosperity.

“Last year, forty percent of all children in this country were born to mothers who were not married,” said Schwartz. “That does not count the infants who were murdered before they were born. Eighty-two percent of African-American children do not have contact with their fathers.”

“Thank you, Great Society,” remarked one member of the audience, referring to the 1960s social programs that, according to the panelists, replaced the family with the state and led to not just economic destruction but weaker institutions.

The same concerns were voiced by Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas), a conservative who has gained support nationally with his robust defenses of states’ rights. “Americans are returning more and more to the words of our founding fathers,” said Perry, who claimed that “clashing values” were weakening the nation. President Obama’s policies were proof of liberals’ value; the relative success of Texas was proof that conservative morals and economics were the answer. “The states should no longer stand by,” said Perry, “and have our pockets picked, our futures mortgaged, and our rights taken away.”

But Perry also revealed how the rhetoric of states’ rights and de-funding controversial organizations was bound up in the teachings of the hard right. “Lately,” said Perry, “I’ve found myself going back to a book that’s titled ‘The 5,000 Year Leap.’”

There were head nods and noises of approval from many members of the audience. That book, written by the late ultra-conservative scholar-cum-conspiracy theorists Cleon Skousen, had been rescued from 28 years of obscurity by Glenn Beck. Perry gave an accurate summary of its content, telling the audiences that Skousen “shares his views of the foundational elements of our nation, placing a special emphasis in faith in God–I think undeniably a source of America’s remarkable success. He asserts that natural law, God’s law, is the basis of our nation’s laws.”

The message got through to the activists who left Washington a few hours later. President Obama’s programs were failing because they were socialist, and defied the Constitution. Fealty to the Constitution was bound to succeed, because America’s founding document was divinely inspired. In gearing up for the 2010 elections and making political hay out of the debt, and out of government funding for groups like Planned Parenthood and ACORN, this was the logic that should guide their campaigning.

In October 2007, former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) won the first straw poll held by this young event, a controversial result skewed by online voting by people who didn’t attend the conference. (There was no such online voting this year.) Mike Huckabee’s strong showing among voters who attended the conference foreshadowed his remarkable victory in the Iowa caucuses three months later.

Huckabee led eight other potential Republican candidates: Romney placed second with 12.4 percent, while Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) polled 12.23 percent, Sarah Palin polled 12.06 percent, and Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) polled 11.89 percent. People included in the poll who didn’t the top five: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum.

Only Pence, Huckabee, Pawlenty and Romney spoke to the conference before the vote, while Rick Santorum was scheduled to give a short invocation for Phyllis Schlafly at tonight’s banquet.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

When government is trying to take over health care, buying car companies, bailing out banks, and giving half the White House staff the title of czar – we have every good reason to be alarmed and to speak our mind!

Romney at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February:

I know we didn’t all agree on TARP. I believe that it was necessary to prevent a cascade of bank collapses. For free markets to work, there has to be a currency and a functioning financial system.

To be fair, in that speech Romney said that TARP should not have been used to rescue car companies. But the opposition to bank bailouts is new. Opposition to TARP has been a motivating force in the Tea Party movement, a possible reason for the softening here.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

“Candidate Obama promised not to raise taxes—’by one dime’—on people making less than $250,000 a year,” Romney said.

“He lies!” shouted a friendly heckler, paying tribute to Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C). Romney laughed as the crowd cheered.

“I approve that comment!” said Romney, smiling and pointing to the heckler.

The likely 2012 presidential candidate also paid fulsome tribute to the Tea Party movement. “[President Obama]’s not going to get his way, thanks to millions of Americas who have stepped up in town halls and tea parties across the country,” said Romney. “The Democrats call them a mob, crazies, trash. I call them patriots.”

Newt Gingrich
Mike Huckabee
Bobby Jindal
Sarah Palin
Ron Paul
Tim Pawlenty
Mike Pence
Mitt Romney
Rick Santorum

Huckabee, Pawlenty, Pence and Romney will all be appearing at the conference. Romney won the last straw poll, in 2007, after most of the GOP contenders, including Rudy Giuliani, appeared before the crowd. But Huckabee beat Romney among voters who actually voted in person — Romney was boosted by online voters. It was a minor harbinger of Romney’s defeat to the much less funded Huckabee in the Iowa caucuses.