I wonder if the mega-pastors will be changing their tune, should it come down to Romney vs. Obama in the general election. If the faithful must always vote for a “real Christian” over a Mormon, doesn’t that imply that these pastors would have to endorse Obama?
Don’t need to. They’ve already used dogwhistles (or on some cases flat out stated) that he’s both a Muslim and a Socialist. No need.
I’m sure race has nothing to do with it. That’d be uncharitable.
-Joe
I suspect the argument will be along the lines of “The Lord can still use someone to accomplish His will even if they aren’t a Christian.”
Southern Baptists have a long history of classifying the LDS church as a cult and not as Christians. I doubt a presidential election will get them to change that position.
And it wouldn’t surprise me if there end up being a few hyper-conservative evangelical pastors who do end up saying people should vote for Obama. Or maybe spend Election Day praying for the future of our country.
Now, see, there’s that argument, and there’s the argument that the pastors are making now that voting for a Christian is always preferable to voting for a non-Christian. Either position, on its own, would be fine. But I suspect that the very same people who are making the latter argument now will also make the former argument a year from now, despite the two positions being mutually contradictory.
Well, I tried to tell everyone on the SDMB ages ago that Romney would be nominated, but I was told repeatedly that I was nuts- that the GOP had moved so far to the right that a perceived moderate COULDN’T win.
Not that I’m gloating. Far from it. I have absolutely no use for Romney, who has been a lifelong liberal and is utterly unconvincing when he tries to sound like a conservative. If David Souter and Anthony Kennedy inspire you, then Mitt Romney is your guy.
I WISH I’d been totally nuts, but unfortunately, I knew my party FAR better than the Left does. The Republicans almost NEVER nominate the choice of the Religious Right. The Country Club Wing controls the Republican party, always has. And those folks usually look around and ask “Whose turn is it to run?”
NOBODY was excited about George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole, but they got the Republican nomination because it was “their turn.” That’s the same reason John McCain was nominated in 2008, and it’s why Romney will be nominated in 2012.
Years ago, I heard someone say that a stripper has an unwritten agreement with the men in the crowd: she pretends she wants to have sex with them, and they pretend to believe her.
That’s what’s going on in the GOP right now. Mitt Romney is pretending to be a conservative, and next year, the Religious Right will pretend to believe him. Religious conservatives will grumble (they’d rather nominate almost ANYBODY but Romney) but they’ll fall in line. They hate Obama enough to settle for a guy they (rightly) don’t trust and whom they (correctly) believe will sell them out more often than not.
It doesn’t really matter in the end who the Republicans nominate. What’s important is that they never put another candidate into the Oval Office.
That said, you’ll never get me to sign on to the notion that it makes any sense to be seriously RUNNING thirteen months before the election.
The 7 dwarfs have committed political suicide. Romney is becoming the only Repub standing. Cain is a joke ,but he will get attention because Romney has to play off somebody.
Palin and Bachmann have fulfilled the left wing predictions. That have shown that they are jokes. Santorum is as his name Googles, a bad joke. Perry has proven he is tool damn stupid to be taken seriously.
Romney is loved by practically nobody. The Christians don’t like his religion. They don’t like his Mass. policies. Nobody likes his many flip flops.
Koch money has not flowed his way. It went to Perry . Now they have to decide it they are willing to buy Romney. He is not far enough right for them.
Yet he is the last man standing.
What Santorum will never realize is that the Google thing is only an insurmountable obstacle because Rick himself is such a clueless douche. If he’d tone down the anti-gay rhetoric and attempt to make himself look as if he was above such petty slanders it would fade into the background. But instead he whines about how unfair Google is and how the big bad gays are picking on him, and thus proves he shouldn’t be elected milk monitor, let alone President. If he can’t handle this, he can’t handle a real crisis.
On Romney: I’m reminded of some of the UK Conservative leadership elections during the Blair years. People like Ian Duncan Smith, William Hague and Michael Howard became Leaders of the Opposition not because they were particularly popular within the party or because they had a vision to move the party forward; it’s just that the other candidates (Clarke, Heseltine, even Portillo) tended to be more polarizing and thus had a small fanbase and a larger group which despised them. IDS, Hague and (somewhat less so) Howard were all bland inoffensive choices, the least worst options on the ballots. Romney strikes me as being cut from the same mold - he’s not what anyone wants but he’s the least irritating second choice for everyone and that might be enough to win in the absence of a more unifying candidate.
Wouldn’t douching with santorum be horribly unhygienic? You’d be sure to catch some sort of nasty infection.
Important to have a one-party state? Not to me.
We have rotation in office in my county (the US). If Obama wins reelection, it becomes more likely that a Republican will take that office in 2016. It also almost guarantees GOP congressional gains in 2014. And the way things are, I think it is more important which party controls congress than who the President is.
You’ll probably say you want a multi-party system, just not with the GOP as a major party. But with the nation so polarized, and political moderates increasingly scarce, now is the least likely time for a party realignment.
Putting aside Huntsman, who has hardly any support, it seems to me that the whole bunch, except for Perry and and Romney, is to Perry’s right. So, logically, Perry should be their second choice. He’s obviously hurt by there being so many debates, but maybe once TV ads become heavier, Perry will make a comeback. Realclearpolitics.com led me to this semi-coherent series of quotations from Rush Limbaugh, the point of which seems to be that his minions should be for Cain now but prepare to switch to Perry. That seems slightly more likely to me than that Cain supporters go to Romney.
My personal best-case scenario would be for Perry to be nominated and fail dramatically, so as to discredit the more extreme side of the GOP. Unlikely, I suppose, unless the economy really picks up next year.
I agree that Romney is it right now. America will pick between the black guy and the Mormon. I feel some more soul-searching will be happening. 
The Repubs are raising Cain right now. The 25 percent Romney has is the Repub base. It does not include the religious fanatics, the tea baggers or the special interest voters. Right now, that is all he can count on. The Religious right will be problematic.
So, when is Cain going to go bust and the Republicans discover Karger? 
You’d like to think so, of course. Don’t let me puncture your fantasy.
But reality is simpler: Romney will be the nomineee, and despite their lack of enthusiasm, most religious conservatives will come around and accept that he’s their only hope to knock off Obama. There isn’t going to be a convention floor bloodbath, and there isn’t going to be a 3rd party candidate. Romney and Obama are all we’ll have to choose from.
2012 will be a repat of 2000 and 2004- all the usual red states will stay red, all the usual blue states will stay blue (the few normall Republican states Obama managed to flip have completely soured on him). It’ll be another squeaker.
This.
With Perry’s standing in the polls having dropped from 32% to 13% in just a month and a half, he’s pretty much toast. Unlike McCain in 2007, there’s really no time to lie low while everyone else gets their chance and falls flat on their faces; that process has pretty much played out.
The Iowa Caucuses are on January 3, just two and a half months away. We’ve already run through the sudden surges and collapses in support for Perry and Trump before him, the eclipse of the Bachmann-Palin Underdrive, the inability of T-Paw to get any voters to care about his candidacy, and the totally unsurprising discovery that the only people who cared whether Newt was running for President were the D.C. pundit class. And even if there was a plausible rescuer out there, there’s no time for such a person to throw together a campaign organization to compete in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
Romney, for all his faults from a GOP base perspective, is the last man standing. And now the money’s flooding into his campaign coffers. Barring something totally out of left field (like being caught in bed with a pair of male Mormon missionaries), he’s the GOP’s nominee.