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Romney: He’s The Harriet Miers Of Presidential Candidates!

The folks at the Prospect must be slipping.  Compare Amy Sullivan’s meaty, well-researched Washington Monthly article on Romney’s evangelical problem with Sarah Posner’s “What Evangelical Problem?” to see a significant difference in substance.  Nonetheless, Posner’s article is interesting, and it highlights some of our favourite Romneyites at Evangelicals for Mitt.  The article also does do us […]

The folks at the Prospect must be slipping.  Compare Amy Sullivan’s meaty, well-researched Washington Monthly article on Romney’s evangelical problem with Sarah Posner’s “What Evangelical Problem?” to see a significant difference in substance.  Nonetheless, Posner’s article is interesting, and it highlights some of our favourite Romneyites at Evangelicals for Mitt.  The article also does do us all a favour and traces the connections between two of the three that helps explain why they are working together to boost Romney’s candidacy.  However, the article starts out hinting that some of the “biggest power brokers of the Christian right are lovin’ Mitt.”  By some, she means exactly three.  That hardly does away with Romney’s larger problems with evangelicals. 

An interesting tidbit about one of the “biggest power brokers,” Jay Sekulow, that had either escaped my notice the first time around or drifted from memory was that Sekulow was a big booster of Harriet Miers’ nomination.  That doesn’t surprise me, since I was pretty sure at the time many evangelicals were thrilled to have “one of theirs” nominated to the Court in spite of her impressive lack of any qualifications for the position.  In fact, besides the gross cronyism and Mr. Bush’s love of incompetent appointees that were at the heart of the nomination, I assumed Bush had selected Miers because she was an evangelical and that this was his ham-fisted attempt to reward evangelicals for their political support.  Evangelicals certainly were enthusiastic about her, and resented the way she was drop-kicked when it became clear that all serious people were convinced the nomination was a horrifying disaster about to unfold. 

That brings us to Mr. Sekulow’s support for Mitt Romney.  If Mr. Sekulow’s judgement in presidential candidates is as poor as it was in backing a nonentity for the Supreme Court (a nonentity who, let us remember, also had an embarrassing record saying things about abortion that were not all together pro-life), we can assume that Gov. Romney is even less qualified that he might otherwise first appear to be.  Considering that Sam Brownback was instrumental in quashing the Miers nomination, it is especially fitting that he should be in a position to undo another one of the people Mr. Sekulow has chosen to support.  Consider also that, in the extremely unlikely event of a Romney presidency, Sekulow could have significant influence on the kinds of justices a President Romney would select, which means that we have good reason to expect more absurd nominees like Harriet Miers should Romney ever reach the White House.  That and that alone ought to be reason enough to make sure that we make this virtually impossible outcome totally impossible.

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