Mitt Romney has added evangelical PR man Mark DeMoss as a senior advisor to campaign. DeMoss, who served on Romney’s Faith and Values Steering Committee in 2008, tells the Boston Globe he’s going to perform the same evangelical outreach he did for Romney again.
In other Romney-evangelical news, the website Evangelicals for Mitt is up and running again, maintained by conservative Christian lawyer David French (who recently joined the American Center for Law and Justice, which is run by Jay Sekulow, who also supported Romney in 2008), his wife Nancy, and Charles Mitchell. At the 2007 Values Voters Summit, Mitchell told me EFM represented evangelicals who were tired of the Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore type of grandstanding, adding Moore’s stunts “made us look like fools.”
Don’t be fooled, though: Romney’s 2008 evangelical supporters may not be Roy Moore, but they have their own goals for remaking the judiciary and American jurisprudence.
The EFM site (not affiliated with the campaign) has a little piggy bank graphic with a rotating message: “Life is a moral issue.” “Rescuing the economy is a moral issue.” “Education is a moral issue.” “Marriage is a moral issue.” “Job-creation is a moral issue.” It’s clearly aimed at attracting abortion-gay marriage-prioritizing plus the “broader agenda” evangelicals. The message: Romney’s evangelical supporters aren’t the one-issue, turn-the-clock back to the middle ages types. But don’t worry, one-issue-turn-the-clock-back to the middle ages types! He supports your agenda, too!
“In other words,” the EFM-ers write, “he’s not just a man evangelicals can support — he’s the best choice for people of faith.” It’s hard for me to see, though, how this man-of-all-faithiness approach is the path to the GOP nomination in 2012.
