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Conservative Christians Heart…Mitt Romney?
Watching Mike Huckabee address the crowd at the 2007 Values Voter’s Summit felt like one of those moments in life when a person wholly finds their element, sort of like how it must have been when Pasteur finally stopped the milk from turning in that French laboratory or right before Daniel crane-kicked Johnny at the end of The Karate Kid. Mike Huckabee not only belonged in that precise moment, he completely owned it – and from the second he opened his strange little mouth, you knew he could not possibly miss.
The current Arkansas Governor worked the 1,200 faithful present into a veritable froth, earning a screaming orgy of flailing Christian appendages every two-minutes or so. It reminded me of a sporting event when oversized t-shirts are shot into the stands and fans temporarily lose control of their basic motor skills. In this case, Huckabee was more than willing to play the role of pep squad leader, unleashing a seemingly endless barrage of faith-based dial-survey words and non-negotiable values onto the crowded conference floor.
Although polling single digits in most national polls, Huckabee’s candidacy is custom made for values voters. Unlike Rudy Giuliani, who earlier in the morning delivered a stupidly incoherent speech about working across ideological barriers, Huckabee is an unabashed Christian who loves Jesus more than breakfast and whose conservative credentials are unquestionable to the point of recently earning a starry-eyed endorsement from conservative-yuppie-spokesman David Brooks.
My belief in the event-specific strength of Huckabee’s candidacy only grew when the caustic Laura Ingraham took to the stage and implored the audience to vote their conscience at the event’s afternoon straw poll – and to worry about beating Hillary sometime after Thanksgiving. Additionally, the vast majority of the folks I spoke with throughout the day mentioned Huckabee as the candidate most in line with their own personal and political views.
So you can imagine my surprise when they announced the poll’s result. I was sitting in a smaller conference room, head cradled in my hands, thinking very quietly about how my entire existence had led to this moment – trapped in a windowless room on a beautiful Saturday afternoon waiting for a speech to commence about “The Impact of the Homosexual Agenda.” Suddenly, a rogue Young Republican shot down the hall, excitedly screeching, “Romney won!”
Anyone who doesn’t think it unequivocally odd when a group of evangelicals endorse an admitted Mormon for the highest office in the land have obviously never spent much time with either demographic. Growing up in an evangelical community, I knew exactly zero conservative Christians who would give a follower of Joseph Smith a bucket of raw water – much less a vote for any public office that wasn’t strictly imaginary.
Saturday’s straw poll may have been just that sort of fantastical contest, but the fact Huckabee did such a good job of connecting with the audience during his speech leads me to believe that a very large swath of poll participants knew exactly what they were passing on when they went with Romney. If we accept this presupposition and interpret the curious poll result as an imperfect measurement of values voter passion leading into 2008, we might also entertain the notion that perhaps the values crowd is simply beginning to chill. Maybe Saturday’s peculiar outcome is merely indicative of a grassroots movement beginning the long metamorphosis towards a more traditional interest group.
Of course, I’m not delusional enough to believe these voters will flip in ‘08, nor am I even suggesting they won’t participate in relatively high numbers. But what if conservative Christians choose to participate without the well-documented energy characteristic of recent presidential elections, a style of grassroots focus and discipline widely credited with delivering the White House to Republicans two elections in a row? What if they roll over for a fake tanned used-car salesman like Romney instead of fighting for a walleyed true believer like Huckabee? In short, what if instead of expanding the electorate, values voters simply become a part of it?
Because that’s what Saturday’s result smelt like to me… a group of weathered, politically interested people who knew exactly where they stood on every issue imaginable, had a candidate who stood in exactly the same place, but who nonetheless decided to phone this one in because the guy they really wanted couldn’t possibly win in an actual election.
This sort of overt pragmatism feels an awful lot like being a progressive in both ’00 and ’04. No matter what Democrat wins the nomination next year, we should not interpret this as anything but a good thing.
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