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4. Romney campaign announces religion advisers
I don't know the Mormon world well enough to know how many LDS members there are among the Romney for President National Faith and Values Steering Committee Chairs. But I do know the evangelical political world enough to be a little surprised. I'm not surprised to see former Council for Christian Colleges & Universities president Bob Andringa on the list, or American Center for Law and Justice head Jay Sekulow. Jack Templeton is more interesting than surprising. Mark DeMoss isn't surprising at all—the publicist apparently had a hand in launching Evangelicals for Mitt (the website's authors and editors are committee vice-chairs).

No. What surprises me is that the list includes Traditional Values Coalition president Lou Sheldon. I'm not surprised that Sheldon is backing Mitt. I'm surprised that Romney wants to be seen with Sheldon. As I've mentioned before, Sheldon has been accused by several other conservative Christian groups of taking bribes to lie. In 2003, this got him banned from meetings by conservative U.S. House members. In 2004 he admitted to CBS News that he's not good at actually reaching voters. In 2006, he said he knew "for a while [that Ted Haggard] had this problem. We weren't sure just how to deal with it. Finally the escort blew it out of the water."

In an earlier National Review Online column, Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out that "In 1998, the TVC defended pro-choice Republican Senate candidate Matt Fong from the attacks of primary opponent Darrell Issa, who was running as a pro-life conservative — after Fong donated $50,000 to the group. In 1999, the Orange County Register reported that the gambling interests had given money both to TVC founder Lou Sheldon and his son in return for their lobbying support."

Mike Schwartz, a vice president of Concerned Women for America, told Ponnuru, "I am ashamed to be in the same business with these people. It is lying to the grassroots by people whom they believe are sincerely interested in the cause, not in payoffs to tell lies."

In other words, Sheldon is not the guy who want when you're trying to shore up your conservative bona fides. That Romney wants this guy on his team suggests to me that he doesn't really understand the evangelical base he's supposedly reaching out to.

5. Evangelicals and "religious threat"
We missed the February 2006 Journal of Politics, where Notre Dame's David E. Campbell argued that "the more secularists in their community, the more likely white evangelical Christians were to vote for Republican presidential candidates in 2000 and 1996." (He's building on the "racial threat" hypothesis —"that white voters feel 'threatened' by the presence of African Americans in their community, and consequently become more likely to vote for racially conservative candidates as the proportion of blacks in their community rises.") But today, Paul Waldman talks about Campbell's study in an American Prospect article. He's particularly interested that Campbell found that "secularists do not appear to respond to the presence of evangelicals in their environment."

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June (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51