Recently in Mitt Romney Category

TIME's Swampland reports on an online petition aimed at dissuading John McCain from picking Mitt Romney as his running mate. The effort is reportedly run by a fringe Christian Right group. But God-o-Meter would guess that McCain would improve his standing among the Christian Right leadership by selecting Romney, who courted those leaders so assiduously as a presidential candidate.

Among too many rank-and-file evangelicals, though Romney never truly connected, and the so-called "Mormon issue" was only part of the reason. One more reason McCain is unlikely to enlist Romney as veep. That, and they seemed to hate each other's guts as on the campaign trail.

As he mulls a run for Congress in Utah, Mitt Romney's son Josh tells the Deseret Morning News that the Mormon factor mattered in his dad's primary loss largely because Mike Huckabee made it an issue:

Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, brought out a surprising number of evangelical voters in Iowa. They weren't voting against a Mormon candidate, Josh Romney said, but he did run into some "pockets of bigotry" occasionally on the campaign trail.

"When it's religion, you definitely take it personally," he said. "It's highly offensive, but I think that the vast majority of people we saw were very accepting. They said, 'Your dad shares our values and we don't care about his religion."'

Only a few times, he said, did he hear voters say they couldn't support a Mormon candidate for president. "I said, 'That's a very un-American thing to say.' I mean, this is a country that based on religious freedom," Josh Romney said.

At the beginning of the campaign, he said, there was much more attention on Mitt Romney's faith, including a Newsweek cover story. "People, when all they knew about my dad was that he was a Mormon, they had a lot of questions about it," Josh Romney said.

That interest had lessened as the campaign season wore on, he said, until Huckabee raised the question of whether Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers during a New York Times interview in December.

That may have hurt his father's campaign, because "it highlighted the fact that his religious views were different" and turned attention back to Mormonism for a few weeks, he said. "It was a smart political move for Gov. Huckabee."

Echoing Hot Air's response to God-o-Meter's op-ed on the Christian Right's failure to help its favored candidate, Mitt Romney, by candidly discussing his Mormonism, conservative Idaho blogger Adam Graham says:

I've always looked at a person's values, not their particular faith, in choosing a candidate.

This is why I'm so offended at the suggestion of Dan Gilgoff in USA Today that the reason that Mitt Romney lost is because we Evangelicals just couldn't bring ourselves to vote for a Mormon. I've followed the national conversation among Conservative Christians about Mitt Romney. Little of it centered on his Mormonism, much more on the fact of his shift on the issues.

At the risk of being redundant, God-o-Meter again cites the recent analysis by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life about evangelical hang-ups over Mormon candidates:

[T]he group of Americans most likely to say they value religiosity in a president - white evangelical Protestants - is also the group most apt to be bothered by his religion. More than one-in-three evangelical Republicans (36%) expressed reservations about voting for a Mormon, a level of opposition much higher than that seen among the electorate overall.

In light of those numbers, God-o-Meter has trouble believing that Graham is really offended by the suggestion that Mitt Romney's Mormonism deterred a fair number evangelicals from backing him.

Over at Hot Air, Bryan has posted a rebuttal to God-o-Meter's USA Today op-ed arguing that the Christian Right helped nominate archenemy John McCain by refusing to discuss the Mormonism of the movement's favored candidate. Bryan argues that GOM and Captain's Quarters:

overstate the influence of evangelical leaders like Dr. James Dobson. Those leaders are influential, but not as influential as they or outsiders think they are. I’ll use myself as an example of why. I’m an evangelical and I only came around to supporting Romney as the best alternative to McCain late in the game, after the Florida primary. The “Mormon issue” had nothing to do with it, though. The flipflop issue and the Fred issue had everything to do with it.

Fair enough. The Mormon issue didn't deter Bryan. But it did make lots of other evangelicals queasy. An analysis late last year by the Pew Forum for Religion & Public Life found that evangelicals are more likely than any other religious demographic to harbor doubts about supporting a Mormon candidate:

[T]he group of Americans most likely to say they value religiosity in a president - white evangelical Protestants - is also the group most apt to be bothered by his religion. More than one-in-three evangelical Republicans (36%) expressed reservations about voting for a Mormon, a level of opposition much higher than that seen among the electorate overall.

The point of God-o-Meter's op-ed was not that all evangelicals would have fallen in line behind Mitt Romney had James Dobson only ordered them to do so. It was that Christian Right leaders, Dobson included, declined to take advantage of Romney's candidacy to open a difficult but important conversation about how evangelicals ought to consider candidates of Mormon or other non-traditionally Christian backgrounds. In ignoring "the Mormon issue," many Christian Right leaders supportive of Romney wound up strengthening Mike Huckabee's hand, which opened a gap in the GOP base for John McCain to slip through. Had the Christian Right seized the Mormon moment, they might have moved enough evangelical votes to have thwarted Huckabee and to have crowned the more viable Romney as the main alternative to McCain.

God-o-Meter has an op-ed in USA Today arguing that the Christian Right helped secure the GOP nomination for its archenemy, John McCain, by neglecting to have a public discussion about the Mormonism of its favored candidate, Mitt Romney. Check it out here and let GOM know if you agree.