On Saturday, Mitt Romney will travel to Lynchburg, Va., to deliver the commencement address at Liberty University, the conservative school founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. When Romney committed to the event weeks ago, he could not have known his speech would come amid a frenzy over President Obama’s change of heart on gay marriage.
In a purely political sense, Obama’s shift — to opponents, it’s a flip-flop, and to supporters, it’s a “wrenching personal transformation” — gives Romney a new opportunity to shore up support among evangelical Christians. After all, in the Republican primaries, Romney scored reasonably well with evangelicals but often trailed rival Rick Santorum, even in races Romney won overall. (In the Ohio primary, for example, Santorum beat Romney among evangelicals 47 percent to 30 percent.) The Liberty University speech would seem the perfect opportunity to make up some ground.
But don’t look for Romney to make a full-throated stump speech when he takes the stage at Liberty. Team Romney knows it’s a commencement address, and commencement addresses are, or should be, about more than the issues of the day. So look for much of Romney’s speech to be about what is important in life, directed to young graduates who are going out into the world. First of all, it won’t be about gay marriage — never was going to be. Campaign sources say Romney will likely discuss marriage, but it won’t be a major theme of the speech. And Romney will certainly discuss the economy, knowing it’s the top issue for most evangelicals as well as everyone else, and that he’ll be talking to newly graduated young people who might well face problems finding a job.
But despite press buildup portraying the speech as a major political statement for a candidate still seeking to firm up conservative support, the bottom line, according to Team Romney, is the speech just won’t be deeply political. Instead, the address will be another opportunity for Romney to present himself as a man who has lived by conservative principles. He’ll do that not by calling himself “severely conservative,” as he awkwardly did at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, but by talking about living life.
One thing Romney has no intention of doing is try to put some distance between himself and the evangelical base, as some liberal-leaning commentators have suggested. William Galston, the political scientist and former Clinton White House official, says Romney would do well to use the Liberty speech as a sort of “Sister Souljah moment” to show the world he is not overly beholden to the conservative base.
“His failure to distance himself from Santorum’s hard-edged social conservatism has cost him,” Galston says, “both with the remaining moderate and liberal Republicans (still nearly 30 percent of the total) and with center-leaning independents.”
Team Romney says that’s just not going to happen. Romney wouldn’t want to do that, they say, nor does he see any need to do it. So don’t look for Romney to criticize his audience.
But he doesn’t have to feed them red meat, either. Romney knows the great majority of evangelical conservatives already plan to vote for him. In April, Gallup found Romney has a big lead over Obama, 54 percent to 35 percent, among Protestants who called themselves “very religious” — a group Gallup calls the “functional equivalent” of evangelicals. “Just as it appears that Republicans as a whole are coalescing around Romney even after the bitter primary battles, highly religious white Protestants appear to be coalescing around his candidacy as well,” Gallup writes.
So Romney doesn’t need to give a fiery campaign speech at Liberty. He doesn’t need to spend his time attacking Barack Obama or gay marriage. Instead, he is more likely to present himself as a candidate evangelicals can feel comfortable about supporting, not just the man they have to vote for if they want to defeat Obama. If Romney does that, he can count his visit to Jerry Falwell’s university a success.
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.
