It was quite a performance. But was it enough?
Mitt Romney ended his tour through Tea Party country on Monday with a late-scheduled slot at Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) Palmetto Freedom Forum. DeMint backed Romney’s run for the White House in 2008, but has not extended him much love this time around.
As he did at a New Hampshire tea party rally over the weekend, Romney laid out his case that the haters on the right are wrong and, truly, the former governor of Massachusetts is just the man the angry wing of the GOP is looking for.
Among the DeMint faithful in South Carolina, Romney — who spoke last among the five candidates who appeared at the event — talked up the role of religion in his life.
“I go on my knees,” Romney said when he described his decision-making process. “I’m a person of faith.”
Romney added, “I look for inspiration.”
That’s the kind of thing he’ll need to hype up if he wants to win over the tea party side of the party, which eyes him warily because of his past as a high-profile moderate and his owning a universal health care law in Massachusetts.
Asked by DeMint about that last item, Romney said, essentially, fuggetaboutit — the bill is actually an asset, he said, and it makes him the better man to go after Obama, not the weaker one.
The Massachusetts law will be “one of my biggest assets,” Romney said, laying out a vision of criticizing Obama with his own Obama-like health care law that he’s used before to limited success.
One thing Romney has done lately that objectively speaks to the tea party sense of things — even while it’s netted him no small amount of grief — is to call corporations people. He’s been defending that line since, and he seemed happy to do so again before a sympathetic audience in South Carolina.
But there were still signs of the fissure between Romney and his party’s fired-up and powerful extreme right-wing. Other, more tea party-friendly, candidates on stage — among them Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul — eagerly leapt at the chance to promise the crowd a vice presidential nominee who would share the conservative values of the forum, Romney was a little more circumspect, calling the talk of VPs “presumptuous.” (His demurring is slightly ironic in itself considering it was Romney who was name-dropping conservative favorites as possible running mates a couple months ago.)
Though he declined the emphatic yeses of some of his competitors, Romney told the crowd at DeMint’s forum not to worry about a surprise liberal on the Romney 2012 ticket.
“I expect they’d all be pro-life and pro-traditional marriage,” he said of his possible options. “They’d share my views.”
