One Of Them

In effect, the Romney campaign provides a near-perfect test of who really wields power in the GOP. On the one hand, conservative elites look at Romney and see a tall, good-looking, well-spoken, highly successful capitalist who, on top of all that--dayanu!--is willing to pretend he opposes gay marriage, abortion, and illegal immigration. In addition to Sekulow, Romney wowed the likes of Jerry Falwell and Gary Bauer at last October's meet-and-greet with evangelical heavies. He performed a similar feat two weeks earlier in a meeting with the Baptist leadership of South Carolina. Romney won positive reviews this January at a conclave of influential conservatives sometimes called the GOP's Renaissance Weekend. And he has thus far gained the admiration of anti-tax jihadist Grover Norquist, disgraced evangelical huckster Ralph Reed, Focus on the Family honcho James Dobson, and much of the staff of National Review.



On the other hand, the typical conservative evangelical looks at Romney and sees a dangerous cult member. As Amy Sullivan has noted in The Washington Monthly, there is a geyser of anti-Mormon sentiment just waiting to be tapped among heartland evangelicals. Sullivan cites, for example, the firestorm a Baptist leader recently ignited simply for apologizing to Mormons after a coreligionist called Utah "a stronghold of Satan." Similarly, a prominent conservative activist recently related the following exchange to my colleague Michelle Cottle: "I asked a friend of mine who's a pastor in Middle America, 'You have a choice between two candidates: Hillary Clinton versus someone who is good on social issues and who is a Mormon.' And my friend said, 'I don't think I could vote for a Mormon.'" And on it goes.



Suffice it to say, if Romney comes up short, it will amount to a repudiation of the party elite by the grassroots. I, for one, will have no choice but to concede that the GOP establishment isn't quite the decisive force most Democrats (and more than a few Republicans) assume it to be. If, on the other hand, Romney clinches the nomination despite the intense suspicion he arouses, we will have unassailable proof that the GOP is dominated by its establishment.

If there's one knock on Romney, then, it's not that he's a Mormon, but that he hasn't sufficiently paid his dues to unite the GOP hierarchy behind him. The combination of a fractured establishment and deep hostility from a key part of the GOP base could be a potential deal-breaker. That's why you see John McCain, the onetime frontrunner, attacking Romney as a fraud even as he largely gives Giuliani a pass.



But, in a way, McCain is missing the point. The people he has to convince aren't the people who watch debates on TV. It's the people who pal around with the candidates backstage. And they already know Romney's a fraud. They just happen to think, in the words of a certain Focus on the Family patriarch, that "he's very presidential."

literally