From
The Weekly Standard:
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney will certainly be pleased with this article about him by Terry Eastland in the Weekly Standard. Mr Eastland sees in Romney a highly plausible presidential candidate.
We start with a summary of Mr Rommey's career to date: corporate consultant; venture capitalist; challenger to Ted Kennedy in 1994; saviour of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics; and Governor of Massachusetts, turning a budget deficit into a surplus without raising taxes or borrowing. "He looks like someone who could be president of the United States," Mr Eastland believes. "He is also ambitious."
Mr Romney told Mr Eastland that whether or not he would run for president would have an important bearing on whether or not he would seek re-election as governor. "There are probably some states where the people would say, 'Hey, we are going to elect you as governor and we don't care if you do something else full-time for two years'," Romney said to Eastland, "but Massachusetts isn't one of those states." Romney also noted that Bill Frist and Rudy Giuliani were potential 2008 candidates who would be running without holding current office, and that Ronald Reagan and Howard Dean were previous examples.
Whilst focusing on appealing to conservatives in his speeches outside Massachusetts, Romney has, according to Mr Eastland, "also found a way to talk beyond the present moment and toward the unknown political landscape of 2008 by describing challenges to our national security, to the economy, and to the culture."
Noting a poll - mentioned here previously - saying that 17% of Americans said they wouldn't vote for a Mormon under any circumstances, Mr Eastland suggests that a Mormon such as Romney "running for president may find his religion a handicap." However, some of the objections to Mormons "might fade if voters got to know a Mormon of compelling political credentials, and came to feel comfortable with him," Eastland argues. He also notes that the Mormon church itself is firm about staying out of party politics, refusing to endorse any candidate or allowing church membership lists to be used for politics. It does, however, occasionally get involved in ballot initiatives such as its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s or its more recent support for constitutional bans on same-sex marriages. Romney himself "emphasizes his independence" from his church in assessing political issues, arguing that, like most other religious people, his faith is not his sole guide in reaching conclusions.
Despite the substantial historical and ideological differences between Mormonism and other Christian faiths, and the history of particularly fierce hostility from evangelical Protestants who dominate the Republican Party, Mr Eastland sees Romney's social conservatism as compensating for his religious faith in the eyes of some Christian conservatives. "Over the past quarter-century," Eastland writes, "Mormons have made common cause wutg politically conservative evangelicals (and Catholics) on a broad range of issues involving marriage, family, abortion, stem cells, pornography, and religious liberty." Much would depend on who else was on offer for the GOP nomination. "Romney's appeal to evangelicals might slacken if a competent evaneglical or Catholic with social views similar to Romney's were in the race," Eastland found. Even on social issues, however, some conservatives argue that Romney could do more as governor against same-sex marriage, embryonic stem-cell research and abortion.
There remains the possibility of Romney's religion being overtly raised to hurt him during an election campaign. "If Romney ran and were in the lead or gaining ground, a desperate candidate, or more likely a political action committee, might bring up the church's pre-1978 exclusion of blacks from the priesthood, or the continuing exclusion of women," Eastland suggests. However, he notes that among those defending Romney if that were to happen would be Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid - also a Mormon.
Asked himself what difference he thought his faith might make, Romney said: "This is a nation that will always welcome people of faith," and added that his religious beliefs were only one aspect of him that people would use to decide whether or not to vote for him.
