Sen. John McCain effectively sealed the Republican presidential nomination today as Mitt Romney quit the race. The Associated Press reports:

“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” Romney will say at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Will the “nutty conservatocracy” now be forced to unify behind McCain? Will you support him?

The Orlando Sentinel styled today’s Florida primary election a wide-open race that could be decided by white evangelicals, a voter-bloc comprising 25 to 35 percent of likely GOP voters. But evangelicals there aren’t necessarily aligning with Huckabee, the Baptist minister on the ballot. In fact, they seem evenly split among three of the major GOP candidates:

“Each candidate speaks to a different interest of the evangelical perspective, and each is getting a share of the pocketbook and family-values vote,” said Pastor Joel Hunter, author of A New Kind of Conservative…A Mason-Dixon Florida Poll conducted this week showed 27 percent of self-described “born again” voters backed Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister who combined a “FairTax” campaign pitch aimed at blue-collar voters with conservative “biblical” values to win a victory in the Iowa caucuses.

But 28 percent favored former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who once made much of his anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage credentials but is now touting himself as a businessman who can fix a “broken” Washington establishment. And 23 percent chose Arizona Sen. John McCain, a maverick conservative and supporter of the Iraq war who in 2000 blasted some evangelical leaders as “agents of intolerance.”

At this point, only Giuliani is already looking like an also-ran, polling just 9 percent. Let’s pretend we’re the Sunshine State. If you were voting today in Florida, which GOP candidate would you vote for and why? Tomorrow, we’ll see if our winner matches the one down south.

Everyone knows that Mike Huckabee was endorsed by martial arts master and warrior of The Octagon, Mr. Chuck Norris. But Mitt Romney wants to know, “Who really deserves the roundhouse kick?” Romney’s answer: “Not me.”

Here’s a link to the transcript of Glenn Beck’s lively interview of Mitt Romney on the subject of Time’s choice of Vladimir Putin as Person of the Year. Key Romney quote: “Isn’t that something? . . . I guess Raul Castro will get it next.”

If Christopher Hitchens ran for president — okay, let’s say he got around the whole niggling, constitutional “born in America” thing — would it be religious bigotry to oppose him based on his atheism? Similarly, is it religious bigotry to be skeptical of Mitt Romney’s Mormon beliefs? WORLD’S Joel Belz explores the question.

Look out, Huckabee.  National Review has endorsed somebody, and it ain’t him.

(more…)

Today, Mitt Romney is giving his “Mormon Speech,” probably as a trick play because of what Huckabee is doing to him in Iowa.   If the speech is really good, or really bad, it might be important enough to include in the canon of important American speeches, mainly for its significance as a marker of the cultural techtonics of the American landscape.  Two writers from The American Scene offer their services at what he should say.  The speech starts with an anecdote about Brigham Young, and it’s quite effective. 

HT: The Atlantic Monthly

. . . That’s the choice conservative evangelical voters face in a Republican primary season that has already narrowed to two frontrunners: Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. In his column this week, Joel Belz dissects the dilemma: Some of his friends, loyal WORLD subscribers among them, say that yes, Giuliani is wobbly on issues like life for the unborn and marriage . . .

But they think that overall he’s the tough-minded man the presidency requires-and they think he’s a straight-shooter whose word can be trusted even if you don’t like some of what he says. Such trust, they say, is especially critical with reference to Giuliani’s promise that he would appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of Roberts and Alito.

I haven’t been persuaded.

But a whole lot more of my friends and acquaintances have surprised me by swearing their early allegiance to Romney. Yes, they concede, they wish his eager pro-life and pro-traditional-marriage commitments had been part of his record for 15 years instead of just 15 months. But they like it (shouldn’t we all rejoice?) when a person admits he’s been wrong, and then embraces what’s right . . .

On this front, Joel writes — maybe more than on the first — he hasn’t been persuaded.