Religious leaders stay out of GOP contest

By Charles Sowell  

JANUARY 19, 2012 1:33 p.m. (0)

The religious right and tea party are badly fragmented going into Saturday’s South Carolina Republican Primary with usual power brokers like Bob Jones III and Southern Baptist leaders wielding little influence over their flocks, political observers say.

Bob Jones University has, for decades, been what has been termed one of the stations of the cross for Republican presidential hopefuls hoping to make an impression in socially conservative South Carolina.

This year not a single presidential hopeful has visited the campus and Jones hasn’t endorsed Gov. Mitt Romney’s bid as he did in 2008. Romney, who was about a 10 minute drive from the BJU campus last week in Greer, didn’t bother to come over to see Jones.

Jones didn’t respond to the Journal’s request for an interview, but he told the National Journal in a recent interview that he didn’t back Romney this time because he doesn’t think Christian voters will rule out a Mormon candidate in this election cycle.

“Number one, he hasn’t asked for it,’’ Jones, chancellor of the fundamentalist Christian university told the National Journal. “I had a reason for doing it the first time. I don’t have that same reason this time.’’

Danielle Vinson, a political science professor at Furman University, said Jones and other Christian leaders in South Carolina have had a hard time making up their mind on who to support.

“Things have changed a great deal since the last (contested) GOP primary. For one, the usual constituencies have ready access to more information and seem to be making their own minds up about who to support,” she said. “Jones still has a very influential and politically active alumni group in Greenville. They are shrewd politically but there are issues with the Republican field that would tend to fragment their vote.”

The result may well be that Romney takes the state by default since he is consistently polling around 30 percent while the conservatives – former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Sen. Rick Santorum, Texas governor Rick Perry and Rep. Ron Paul – split the remainder of the vote.

Depending on the poll, there are about 10 percent who are undecided.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman dropped out of the race on Monday, throwing his support behind Romney, a move that may net the frontrunner a percent or two in voting Saturday, Vinson said.

Shouting matches broke out at the tea party convention last weekend at Myrtle Beach when supporters of Gingrich took the stage to urge the organization to throw its support behind the former speaker.

“It may well be that some social conservatives in South Carolina will hold their noses and vote for Romney,” said Vinson.

Also, on the Baptist side, there is a hangover left from the 1979 takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by conservatives from Texas that very nearly split the church down moderate and far right camps, said Vinson.

Stephen Fox is an activist in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a more moderate group that grew out of the Southern Baptist Convention schism in the late 1970s.

“You see a lot of prominent Southern Baptist preachers taking sides in private and in the pulpit,” he said. “I don’t know where it will all lead, but I think a lot of Baptists are going to come down on Romney’s side in the end.”

Fragmented Texas Baptists backed Santorum last weekend at a meeting of 125 Christian right leaders including Family Research President Tony Perkins, former Family Research chief Gary Bauer and Focus on the Family President James Dobson.

The question remains to be seen if that support will be enough to stem the tide for Romney in South Carolina.

“The conservatives are still looking for a candidate, any candidate, they can unite behind,” Vinson said. “First there was Michelle Bachman, who had problems drawing support, and then there was the (Gov.) Rick Perry debate debacle and Herman Cain’s sex scandal problems.”

Polling data indicate some movement on the conservative side.

Paul has moved into second place (tied with Santorum) in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released last weekend. The data indicate growing support for the Texas congressman.

In that poll Romney was ahead 37 to 16 percent over Paul and Santorum. Gingrich slid to fourth place tallying 12 percent of likely voters.

How much impact Monday’s GOP debate in Myrtle Beach will have on the state’s electorate also is a factor as is the blizzard of attack ads flooding the state’s airwaves.

“I know I’m tired of the ads already,” Vinson said.

Many voters, like Bill Henry of Greer didn’t make up their mind about who to support until late in the campaign season.

Henry, a retired General Electric salesman and native of Ohio, was paying his first visit to Tommy’s Ham House to hear Santorum speak last weekend in Greenville.

“I like his values,” said Henry a self-described evangelical and strong pro-life advocate. “I wasn’t sure until I heard him speak. I was torn between him and Gingrich. But now I’m gonna vote for him.”

There were similar statements at a Romney event last week in Greer when the candidate showed up for an early morning rally at Cherokee Trikes & More, a motorcycle dealer located in the lee of the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport.

Romney characterized his business experience as a plus to the friendly crowd and called dealing with the deficit a moral question, one that he is prepared to answer.

Gingrich, appearing at a fundraiser for the Spartanburg and Greenville County Republican Party, played hard on tea party sentiment blasting what he called activist judges, who he said he’d feel free to ignore should he win the presidency.

He also played to a favorite tea party subject during his speech, promising to deal with the United Nation’s Agenda 21. The subject has taken on mythical proportions among some in the tea party that see backing things like planning and zoning as a plot to take away personal liberties.

Santorum echoed many of those ideas and added his own family friendly ideas for keeping people out of poverty.

“Get an education, get a job and get married,” he said to cheers from the crowd. “Those three things are virtually guaranteed to keep people out of poverty.”

Polling data from FOX News indicates that Romney will have an easy time in the state, taking 40 percent of the total among likely voters.

That data is very similar to the Reuters/Ipsos poll of likely voters.

However, when things turn to the general election, FOX found, Romney was the only one of the GOP field that comes close to beating President Obama.

A single percent separated Romney and Obama in a hypothetical matchup. Obama would beat Gingrich by 14 percent and Santorum by 12, the data indicate.