Chewy Toyz

Posted at 12:38 PM on December 8, 2007 by Tom Scheck (2 Comments)

In other words, some things to chew on this weekend.

1) What did folks think of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's speech about religion on Thursday? He only mentioned his Mormon faith once. On the one hand it got the issue out in front of the voters. Polling suggests that 1 in 4 voters would be less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate for President. But the blog wonders whether the speech reminded the evangelical vote on why they shouldn't vote for him.

2) Speaking of the Evangelical movement, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is surging ahead in a recent Newsweek poll. As a commenter pointed out in an earlier post, this may have a lot to do with the Evangelical vote. Does Huckabee have the staying power to win Iowa? The GOP nomination? The presidency? Will Huckabee's background as a Baptist Minister give him problems in a general election?

3) Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd is criticizing Illinois Senator Barack Obama for pushing Iowa students who pay out of state tuition to come back to Iowa to participate in the caucuses. The caucuses are on January third which is right smack in the middle of winter break for many schools. The controversy started when Des Moines Register Columnist David Yepsen wrote that Iowans would not look favorabll on Obama's push. Here's a Politico story on the subject. Do you think Iowans will care that much? Is it bad to tell a student who grew up in Ilinois, Minnesota or Wisconsin but now spends nine months out of the year going to school in Iowa that they should not drive back to participate in the Caucuses?

4) Finally, the New York Times has an interesting story on the problems pollsters are having in a cell phone universe. Have you given up your landline? Would you even take a call from a pollster? Does this now mean younger voters won't be sampled appropriately?

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Comments (2)

Tom, you know how hard it is to get any kind of discussion or information exchange going here on Polinaut because of your intermittently monitored moderation policy--and you set out *four* questions for discussion anyway?

Thank you for setting out the evangelical thing for discussion. If you want to read right-wing agonizing over Romney and "how he did" in his defense of his Mormon faith--read Peggy Noonan's take in the WSJ. She squirms all over the place in her attempts to laud his speech. She ends up by criticizing Romney for leaving out atheists and agnostics in his defense of different religious perspectives--ignoring the fact that Romney made it clear in the speech that he would not defend the rights of atheists or agnostics. He made it clear in the very speech we are discussing: Romney wants some kind of "official" role for God in American public life. Americans who don't share that "general, official agreement about God" will naturally be relegated to second class status in the kind of society Romney and the religious right envision.

And Noonan's pose is to be offended by this: she ends by insinuating that evangelical voters that Romney is trying to court here (by downplaying his own beliefs and calling for official religious values for the country) are "idiots."

In the end, it's not our individual reactions to Romney's pathetic attempt to woo evangelicals that matter. It's how Romney's attempt is perceived by the leaders of the evangelical political movement, by their rank and file--and how it's reported by the media (as a success or failure.) I think it's likely that these groups are not going to buy it--with evangelical Huckabee doing so well ("a miracle," "a sign of God's will, in the face of all of Mitt's money and secular media wisdom.") And the EPM is going to see that Romney is talking out of both sides of his mouth in his attempt to woo them; they don't want an America based on religious tolerance for all faiths and creeds, they want an America that is "more Christian", in their peculiar understanding of that word and those values.

Finally: Romney got the media and the evangelicals to tune in by billing this speech as a defense of his Mormon faith. As you noted--it was no such thing. He specifically rejected the opportunity to do this, after announcing that that was going to be what the speech was about.

Big mistake, if the object was to woo some of the evangelical votes. I have no doubt that radio stations across America are even now explaining the more colorful aspects of the LDS doctrine to evangelical audiences (God's home on planet Kolob, the men on the moon who dress like Quakers, the view that Jesus is a created being, etc.) in the wake of Romney's refusal to discuss doctrine.

Romney should not have announced that he was going to do a triple-gainer high dive, and then performed a belly-flop. That's going to get him all sorts of "bad" attention from the crowd he gathered.

Posted by Bill Prendergast | December 8, 2007 1:34 PM

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I have a VOIP line that isn't listed, and a cell phone. I don't give them out to political places, so I don't get sampled.
The kicker is that young people, as a whole, don't vote in any quantity, so the difficulty in reaching them might not skew results very far.

Posted by MR | December 10, 2007 8:41 AM

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