Ross thinks the “weirdness” attack on Romney is an implicit reference to Romney’s religion, but doesn’t see how it will work:

I have a much harder time seeing how insinuations about the peculiarity of Romney’s theological commitments fits into a narrative about why Americans shouldn’t trust him with a lousy economy. His Mormonism, in this sense, may turn out to be a lot like Barack Obama’s connections to Bill Ayers and the Chicago left, which conservatives tried to make hay from in the waning days of the ‘08 election: In a different kind of race, it might be a serious liability, but in a campaign focused on jobs, debt and growth, trying to sow doubts about Romney’s faith will just make the Democrats look out of touch.

That could be, but this doesn’t take into account the importance of culture and identity politics in any mass democratic political system. One of the common laments on the left is that cultural conservatives vote against their own economic interests, which disregards the importance that cultural issues and culture war politics have for them. Even conservatives inclined to agree that the GOP doesn’t serve the economic interests of its working- and lower-middle class constituents would agree that Republican appeals to American nationalism/exceptionalism and generic religious faith are important for retaining the loyalty of these voters even when, or perhaps especially when, Republican governance has not delivered much in terms of prosperity and opportunity for them. I would argue that identity politics will work against Romney in the same way that the GOP has used them to its advantage in previous cycles. In fact, it is partly because the GOP has made appeals to “faith” to be as generic as possible that this has masked the degree to which many of its Christian supporters have always assumed that this refers to their Christian faith. Religious conservatives in the U.S. are ecumenical in their political alliances, but only up to a point, and for many of them a Mormon presidential candidate is a bridge too far.

As Ross notes, and as I have observed before, there is a broad cross-section of the public that admits that they won’t support a Mormon for President. We can’t know how important of a factor this is for the people saying this, and we shouldn’t assume that it would actually keep all of them from voting for Romney no matter what, but it will be a significant drag on his candidacy should he become the nominee. What makes Romney’s religion significantly different from Obama’s associations in Hyde Park as a political matter is that the latter seemed to have no real relationship to who Obama was, what he was proposing to do, or how he would govern. Obama’s associations were supposed to prove that he was a left-wing radical. This didn’t catch on because it was so completely at odds with the conventional center-left, fairly hawkish campaign that Obama ran, and because the arguments used to promote this idea were nonsense.

Concerns about Romney’s religion carry more weight than weak guilt-by-association attacks. Among some conservative Christians, there is concern that electing a Mormon would represent a form of acceptance or an endorsement of a religion that they consider to be not only not Christian but fundamentally false and misleading. For those who insist that ours is or should be a “Christian nation,” that is unacceptable. Among quite a few secular liberals and critics of “theocons,” Mormonism represents the cultural conservatism they dislike, and the more alarmist arguments portray a Mormon President as a threat to the separation of church and state. Viewed this way, Romney’s religion is not just a distinctive biographical detail, but something that potentially threatens the way that some conservatives and liberals understand what America is. It has the unusual disadvantage of provoking opposition from cultural conservatives and those who can’t stand cultural conservatives, and it wins disapproval from a significant percentage of everyone in between.

Economic conditions may be bad enough that this will not be enough to keep Romney from winning, but if his religion would be a serious liability at other times it seems unlikely that this problem will go away now. The difficulty for Romney is that his political opponents don’t need to sow doubts. The doubts are already there, and will continue to be there whether anyone mentions them.

Despite Tim Pawlenty’s best efforts to lower expectations ahead of Saturday’s straw poll in Ames, Politicoreports on why nothing less than winning will be good enough:

Iowa caucus veterans say the calculus for Pawlenty is both simpler and harsher: Anything short of a flat-out win will make it exceedingly difficult for him to claim momentum in a rapidly accelerating 2012 primary race.

With all the resources Pawlenty has committed to Iowa, he’ll need a real trophy to carry back to his core supporters, as well as the undecided donors he desperately needs to win over. Pawlenty has struggled to raise money throughout his 2012 bid, and could end up running on fumes if he can’t demonstrate his viability in Iowa this weekend.

Rick Perry will be making an announcement on Saturday designed to compete with the result of the straw poll, and his entry into the race seems assured. That makes things much harder for Pawlenty for several reasons, including Perry’s instant ability to take over the anti-Romney role that Pawlenty has tried and so far failed to fill. It also means that no one is going to be paying much attention to any of the candidates finishing third or worse. To make any significant impression on Saturday, Pawlenty needs to win. At least, that’s what some veteran observers in Iowa believe:

David Yepsen, a former longtime Des Moines Register columnist, said that Pawlenty has “got to have something to crow about” after Ames, especially in light of Rick Perry’s imminent entry into the campaign.

“What’s gonna bust through the clutter of Rick Perry on Saturday? Winning,” said Yepsen, suggesting that a bad week for Pawlenty “could knock him out of the race.”

Supposing that Pawlenty manages to surprise everyone and win the straw poll, it will be what he needs to survive, but it may not be enough to propel him into the top tier now that Perry is coming into the race. It’s clear that Pawlenty’s woes over the last several months have been an important factor in leaving an opening for Perry to enter the race. If Pawlenty had appeared to be more successful over the last few months, the demand for another candidate would not be nearly as great, and the opportunity for Perry to enter the race with immediate support as the alternative to Romney would not have presented itself. Once Perry is in the race, Pawlenty’s “underdog” routine won’t help him very much, since this just confirms that Romney and Bachmann skeptics should turn to Perry instead. He won’t be able to rely on his executive experience argument as heavily, because Perry can boast of having served even longer as governor. Just as Bachmann was able to outflank Pawlenty as a fiscal and social conservative, which made her a better alternative to Romney up until now, Perry matches and perhaps exceeds Pawlenty in all of the areas that are supposed to make Pawlenty preferable to Bachmann. Saturday could be the day when Pawlenty’s campaign revives only to be reminded that the revival has come too late.

The Hill‘s Congress Blog has published a truly awful bit of pro-MEK propaganda by David Amess, a British MP and head “a leading member” of the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom. Amess rails against appeasement and labels those who oppose removing the MEK from the FTO list “cronies” of the regime. In the midst of this smear, Amess has the gall to complain that opponents of de-listing are trying to “demonize” the paid advocates of the MEK. In fact, no one is “accusing them of speaking only to get paid.” That would be unfortunate, but that isn’t the issue. What is worse is that the people receiving the money say that they are speaking on behalf of the MEK because they truly believe its self-serving claims.

For a better treatment of the entire question, here is a new report for Free Radio Europe by Golfan Esfandiari. Esfandiari reminds us that the legitimate opposition in Iran is firmly opposed to the MEK/MKO and does not want it removed from the FTO list:

But the issue also draws protests from a less likely source — members of Iran’s Green Movement who themselves are critical of the exiled group and are wary of attempts by the MKO (aka People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran) and by the Iranian government to portray them as allies in opposition.

And Green Movement members also warn that removing the MKO’s terrorist designation could inadvertently send a negative signal to people in Iran and tarnish their view of the United States.

The MEK is so deeply loathed even in opposition circles that Iranian opposition figures state bluntly that they would rather keep the current government than have one led by that group:

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one Green Movement member in Iran claims that if he had to choose between the current leaders in Iran and the MKO — which is led by Maryam Rajavi and Massoud Rajavi (who hasn’t been seen or heard from in the past several years) — he would definitely “keep” the current regime.

“I know they claim abroad they’re part of the Green Movement [but] it’s a big lie,” he says. “We don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

The most obnoxious part of Amess’ screed is the insistence that only “cronies” of the regime could possibly oppose de-listing the MEK. If that were true, it would make the Green movement and the vast majority of Iranians into the regime’s “cronies,” and this is obviously not the case. Far from doing any harm to the Iranian government, de-listing the MEK would be a gift to the current leadership in Tehran and a disaster for the domestic opposition.

P.S. Here is a little bit of background on Amess’ group:

The committee is sponsored by the National Resistance Council of Iran (NRCI), evoking shades of the way Chalabi and his cronies claimed to speak for Iraq before 2003.

The NCRI is the political front for the MEK.

Jonathan Tobin thinks the plan to attack Romney’s character is bound to fail because it contradicts Obama’s original campaign message:

As difficult as Obama’s re-election prospects may seem today as the economy continues to sink, the 2008 candidate of “hope and change” can’t be re-elected by “swift boating” his opponents.

As I said, attacking Romney in this way isn’t going to work for Obama, but not for this reason. Candidates have won the Presidency partly on vacuous messages of cooperation and unity and then gone on to run for re-election using just these sorts of attacks. When Bush ran the first time, he promoted himself as the candidate of bipartisan compromise. He was, as he never stopped telling us, “a uniter, not a divider.” Starting in 2002, Bush abandoned these pretenses and largely pursed policies that were designed to stoke the support of his party base. Polarization worked for Bush, and Ramesh Ponnuru thinks that it could work for Obama, but there is nothing inherent in exploiting political polarization that should harm Obama.

After all, what is it that most disaffected liberals and Democrats find so infuriating about Obama? It is that he is always striving for accommodation and consensus, and they prefer someone who engages in polarizing partisan fights. If Obama followed through on attacking Romney’s character, this would be an example of the “tough” political tactics that they believe have been lacking in Obama so far. Democrats regard “swift-boating” as an ugly tactic mainly because it was used against them, and because they saw it as a scurrilous, unfounded attack. Seen that way, Obama can’t really “swift-boat” Romney without accusing him of fabricating something that has been a central part of his public persona. That isn’t what Obama’s campaign is proposing to do. The attack on Romney’s “weirdness” has much more in common with attacking Al Gore’s “reinventions” than it does with the effort to attack Kerry’s war record.

Joshua Landis critiques a recent call for an activist U.S. policy on Syria in The American Interest, and he advises the U.S. to leave Syrian regime change to the Syrians:

But by helping to “fast forward” the Syrian revolution, the U.S. could be creating a Frankenstein. If the opposition doesn’t have time to produce a leadership that emerges organically out of struggle, Syria may never unite. The U.S. may cause more destruction and death, not less. To be truly successful, the opposition must come together under one set of leaders who win the confidence of the people by their intelligence, canniness, and most importantly, by their success.

As Prof. Landis notes, the Syrian opposition is currently neither united nor does it have any overall leadership. While this is often considered one of the virtues of the Syrian opposition, because it prevents the regime from targeting opposition leaders with arrest and violence, it reflects the severe limitations of opposition forces. More important, it gives the Syrian business community no incentive to take any risks on behalf of an opposition that it does not trust or respect:

Before they will help overthrow the Assads, they need a safe alternative. They are not going to embrace — not to mention fund — a leaderless bunch of young activists who want to smash everything that smells of Baathist privilege, corruption, and cronyism. After all, who are the CEOs of Syria’s crony capitalism if not the business elites of Aleppo and Damascus?

The Doran/Shaikh article that Landis critiques makes one major assumption that he does not address directly, and it does not seem to be well-founded. They believe that it is possible to ensure the rise of “a new order hospitable to the United States” in Syria. I suppose it depends on what they mean by hospitable, but the idea that post-Assad Syria could be more well-disposed towards the U.S. seems to be little more than wishful thinking. Syrian public opinion has been and continues to be overwhelmingly disapproving of the U.S. Why should the Syrian opposition accept American help, and why would any “hospitable” transitional government survive for any length of time?

There is a generally fair and positive profile of Ron Paul in the evangelical magazine World. Here is a sample:

Paul supports international commerce and trade but opposes all wars, unless they are what he considers defensive. He would cut all U.S. governmental aid to Pakistan, to Israel, and to the nations in Africa where the United States has made big investments in addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He argues that Christians in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, are worse off due to U.S. intervention there: “Christians have lived there since the time of Christ. They survived. And yet the one consequence of this war is that Christians have had to become refugees and actually leave Iraq.”

The withering of Christianity under persecution in Iraq is one of the many adverse consequences of the decision to invade. There was a recent article in Foreign Policy that argued that evangelical skepticism of Arab democracy was informed by sympathy with persecuted Christians in Muslim-majority nations, but something I noticed was missing in this article was any mention of how little evangelical opposition there was to the wars in Iraq and Lebanon that have done so much damage to the Christian communities in both countries. There is now some awareness of the harm that the Iraq war did to the Catholic and Assyrian communities of Iraq, but it is mostly too late.

Politicoreports that the Obama campaign plan is to make the general election a referendum on Mitt Romney’s “weirdness.” There is some political mileage to be made out of Romney’s phoniness, I agree, but they must be out of ideas if this is their big plan. What I found more puzzling was the Obama team’s belief that Romney will take on additional baggage of unpopular conservative positions during the nominating contest:

Obama officials, however, believe they’ll have more grist for their flip-flop line of attack after the primary because Romney will eventually have to veer right to convince the GOP base he can be trusted with the nomination.

“He’s going to take some unpopular, right-wing stands,” an adviser said. “That was one of the main things that hung McCain up — how he had to go through the nominating process.”

I have to assume that they were not paying attention. In 2007-08, McCain was not “hung up” by adopting “unpopular, right-wing stands.” McCain’s problem in the nominating process was that his support for immigration amnesty had harmed his presidential bid, and he spent the rest of the campaign claiming that he had learned from the backlash against the bill. In truth, McCain mostly talked about immigration as little as possible after that, and tried to placate voters by emphasizing enforcement. If this remained a problem for McCain during the general election, it was a problem of weaker turnout among conservatives who had no interest in voting for him because they didn’t trust him on this and many other issues. McCain’s main difficulties in the 2008 campaign were his strong attachment to the Iraq war, which had been extremely unpopular ever since 2006, and the utterly clueless and haphazard way in which he responded to the financial crisis in September. The financial crisis itself also guaranteed that the candidate representing the incumbent party was sure to lose.

Romney has so far distinguished himself in the last six months with fewer instances of sudden changes in position. Most of Romney’s metamorphosis from moderate Northeastern Republican to standard-issue movement conservative happened several years ago. There will always be those, including myself, who regard Romney as profoundly untrustworthy and unusually unprincipled, but during this cycle Romney has continued to play the role he first assumed in 2007. Romney remains an exceptional opportunist, but he has spent enough time in his new role that this isn’t as much of a problem for him as it used to be. The Massachusetts health care legislation that is supposed to wreck Romney’s chances at the nomination is the one thing from his past that he has so far refused to disavow. Romney has probably done all the veering right that he is going to do, and he may not need to do much more to win the nomination. As long as there are several popular candidates running to his right during the nomination contest, Romney just needs to retain the conservative vote he had last time and rally the moderate vote that was split between him, McCain, and Giuliani last time. The threat from Huntsman has so far failed to materialize, which gives Romney the luxury of being able to avoid a lot of new pandering that would remind voters that he will say anything to win support.

Romney is a phony, but the Obama campaign is overestimating how useful that will be. If they are drawing on the lessons of 2004, they are failing to remember that Bush barely eked out re-election when the economy was still in relatively good shape. Kerry the “flip-flopper” narrowly lost that election, but does anyone think that Kerry would have lost if unemployment had been over 8%? Of course not. Campaigning against Romney by making him into the new Kerry will be seen as a sign of desperation, which is what it is.

The Christian Science Monitor has an extensive article on the Mujahidin-e Khalq’s lobbying efforts. It reviews the terrorist group’s history and the debate over removing it from the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list, but it goes into much greater detail in describing how the MEK has been getting the support of many prominent American advocates. The most disturbing thing in the article is the claim that top national security officials wouldn’t have heard about the MEK prior to being approached by the group’s representatives:

“Top-level national security officials never heard about the MEK; it never rose to their level until now,” says another US official. “So when MEK representatives show them a political platform comprised of the ’15 greatest ideas of Western civilization,’ it looks pretty compelling.”

If you knew nothing about the group until now, and you were extremely gullible, I suppose it could be. Ignorance would help to account for why so many former officials and politicians would be willing to associate themselves with the cause of a terrorist group, but it is hardly reassuring that “top-level” national security officials are so ignorant of the recent history of Iran and Iraq that being approached by representatives of this group wouldn’t raise any red flags. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that these officials don’t understand the region’s politics and history very well, but that is just one more reason not to heed their recommendations on how to treat the MEK.

The article goes on to list quotes from Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, and a number of former Bush administration officials, all of whom are on the record saying embarrassing things in praise of the MEK. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell may have qualified for the most egregious flattery when he said, “MEK is a force for good, and the best hope we have.” While these people may not be able to appreciate what this sounds like to most Iranians, having so many prominent national figures in the U.S. singing this group’s praises signals to Iranians that Americans see both the Iranian people and the regime as our enemy. If the State Department were so unwise as to remove the MEK from the FTO list, that would mark this administration as being more hostile towards Iran than the two administrations before it.

Confirming just how creepy the cult of personality built around Maryam Rajavi is, the article describes Camp Ashraf:

Her portrait – along with that of husband and co-leader Massoud Rajavi, who has been in hiding since 2003 – is as ubiquitous at Camp Ashraf as Saddam Hussein’s once was across Iraq, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s still is in Iran. Every day at the camp, the MEK motto is heard: “Iran is Rajavi, Rajavi is Iran. Iran is Maryam, Maryam is Iran.”

Obviously, a new totalitarian political cult is not what Iranians need or want. The group has eagerly started saying all of the right things about democracy, but the group’s organization and practices show that it has no values in common with the legitimate Iranian opposition or with the United States. In the past, the State Department has understood this:

A US State Dept. report in 1994 dismissed MEK efforts to reinvent itself. Noting the MEK’s “dedication to armed struggle”; the “fact that they deny or distort sections of their history, such as the use of violence”; the “dictatorial methods” of their leadership; and the “cult-like behavior of its members,” the State Dept. concluded that the MEK’s “29-year record of behavior does not substantiate its capability or intention to be democratic.”

Nothing about the MEK has changed in the last seventeen years, except that it has become more adept at getting Americans opposed to the Iranian government to work on its behalf. As Trita Parsi explains, the only thing that has made the decision to keep the MEK on the list remotely controversial is that the group’s lobbying is much greater this time around:

The momentum to remove the terrorist status “is all about [the MEK’s] ability to muster a political lobbying campaign,” says Parsi. If the decision were based on “the merits of the case, this would be as uncontroversial as the four times that the Bush administration re-listed them. Four times. No controversy.”

Put another way, not even the Bush administration was willing to accept the MEK’s reinvention, and they were hardly interested in fostering good relations with Tehran. The Obama administration should likewise reject the appeals of these paid advocates for a terrorist group.

Tim Pawlenty has been desperately trying to lower expectations for the Ames straw poll for several weeks. One of his new lines is that a third place finish behind Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann won’t be all that meaningful if they are not perceived to be “credible” candidates nationally. Jim Antle comments:

There are two small problems with Pawlenty’s contention. One is that most observers believe Pawlenty actually has a better ground operation in Iowa than Bachmann, even if the Minnesota congresswoman is currently more popular with potential caucus-goers. Second, the types of straw polls that Paul has traditionally done best at are ones where he can bring his national following along rather than turning out voters in a single state. So it would be somewhat significant if Pawlenty finished behind Bachmann and Paul.

One thing that Pawlenty can’t escape is that he made Iowa the centerpiece of his campaign strategy, and he has made great efforts to build his campaign organization in Iowa, so it is very difficult for him to present something below first or second place as anything other than a huge failure. His campaign is reputed to be the best-organized in the state, and the Ames straw poll is a test of organization, so Pawlenty ought to be considered the favorite. That no one considers him to be the favorite at a contest for which his campaign should be ideally suited speaks volumes about the weakness of Pawlenty’s candidacy. We should just consider how quickly everyone would have dismissed Romney’s chances in 2007 if his major push to win the Ames straw poll had come up short and he had finished third behind Huckabee and Brownback. If Pawlenty finishes third or worse on Saturday, the response should be the same.