Conservatives move against Romney as VP pick

Mathew D. Staver, dean of Liberty University School of Law and founder of the conservative legal advocacy group Liberty Counsel, recently organized a meeting in Denver of some 100 top Christian conservative leaders in which they agreed to try to coalesce around Mr. McCain, despite reservations about him.

But Mr. Staver said that choosing Mr. Romney would “not advance the ball within the evangelical bloc of voters that McCain needs.”

“It would make my job to rally the grass roots more difficult,” he said.

Mr. Romney’s shifting stances and tone on abortion, gay rights and other issues clearly figure into his critics’ feelings, but his Mormon faith also remains a factor in attitudes toward him among some evangelicals.

“I think Romney would be very acceptable to the foreign policy conservatives and the economic conservatives and most social conservatives,” said Richard Land, leader of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. “But I think it’s fair to say that about 15 to 20 percent of evangelicals would have a difficult time voting for a Mormon on either side of the ticket.”

Mr. Land said he believed that Mr. Romney’s faith should not be an issue, pointing out that Mr. Romney managed to win at least the tacit approval of many national evangelical leaders and made significant gains among rank-and-file evangelicals. But a sizable number of state-level activists have remained adamantly opposed to Mr. Romney, Mr. Land said, attributing the phenomenon partly to the fact that many are heavily involved in their evangelical churches, which do not consider Mormonism a part of Christian orthodoxy.

“It would mean at the margins there would be some evangelicals who just wouldn’t vote,” Mr. Land said.

Since his exit from the race, Mr. Romney has continued to work to burnish his conservative credentials, forming a political action committee, Free and Strong America, in the spring that has contributed roughly $50,000 to conservative candidates across the country. Peter Flaherty, Mr. Romney’s former deputy campaign manager who was one of his top advisers for conservative outreach, is executive director of the committee.

Last week in Ohio, however, about a dozen grass-roots conservatives, many of them former Huckabee backers, gathered in Cincinnati to discuss their alarm about the talk of a McCain-Romney ticket and to draw up plans for a new group, Social Conservatives Against Mitt Romney.

“We’re talking about getting the word out to people about the fact that we don’t want Mitt Romney as the candidate,” said Diane Stover, the leader of a social conservative group in the Cleveland area, who dialed into the meeting. “There seems to be a groundswell of voices for Mitt Romney out there, but I want to make sure the grass-roots voices are heard.”

In April, a collection of social conservative leaders took out a full-page advertisement in a newspaper in Arizona when Mr. McCain was campaigning there that was headlined, “An Open Letter to John McCain: No Mitt.”

The ultimate danger for Mr. McCain is not necessarily that Christian conservatives will not vote for him if he chooses Mr. Romney, but that they will not be as energetic in turning people out to vote, said David Fornshell, vice chairman of the Republican Party in Warren County, Ohio, where evangelical turnout helped lift President Bush to victory in 2004 in that critical state.

“I’m going to back whomever McCain picks,” said Mr. Fornshell, who supported former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee in the primary. “But am I concerned that there is a very important, very hard-working segment of traditional Republican backers who might not work hard? Yeah, that concerns me.”

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