A seat at Romney's table
AFTER THE Democrats won back Congress and the socially liberal Rudy Giuliani and the Jerry Falwell-bashing John McCain emerged as the Republican presidential front-runners, many political observers theorized that the Christian Right's power was on the wane. Last week's Republican presidential debate suggested otherwise.
Indeed, with the candidates more or less agreeing on such major foreign policy issues as the Iraq war and preventing a nuclear Iran, each distinguished himself mostly by how close or how far he stood from the Christian Right.
But history shows that Republican presidential candidates who fall on either end of the continuum, who either embody the Christian Right (Pat Robertson in 1988) or who reject it (Texas Senator Phil Gramm in 1996) lose the nomination. The two most electorally successful Republican presidential candidates of the last 30 years -- Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush -- took a different path, embracing the movement even though they were outsiders to it. If the next Republican to occupy the White House must follow that same strategy, Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor, may be in much better shape than polls suggest.
Like Romney, neither Reagan nor Bush could claim to be a true Christian Right candidate. On paper, Reagan was anathema to the movement; he was a Hollywood divorcé who seldom attended church and who, as California governor, had signed relatively liberal abortion laws.
Bush's family-man credentials and evangelical faith made him a more natural fit for the Christian Right. Still, the movement was skeptical of the moderate reputation Bush honed as governor of Texas.
But rather than openly defy the movement, as Giuliani and McCain have done, Reagan and Bush worked doggedly to make up for their shortcomings in the eyes of the Christian Right. Campaigning in 1980, Reagan adopted an evangelical lexicon and told a huge Christian Right rally in Dallas, "I know you can't endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you." As president, he regularly invited Jerry Falwell to the White House and endorsed a school prayer amendment to the Constitution.
Bush went further. He met frequently with evangelical leaders in private during his 2000 White House bid and spoke openly of the role Jesus played in his decision to give up drinking. In his first term, Bush signed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, backed an amendment the Constitution to ban gay marriage, and threatened to veto funding for expanded embryonic stem cell research.
For both Reagan and Bush, the electoral punch gained from embracing the Christian Right was undeniable. In 1980, the white born-again Christians who four years earlier had given roughly half their votes to Jimmy Carter -- an evangelical Sunday school teacher -- broke for Reagan by two to one. Reagan won similar evangelical backing for his reelection.
Bush harnessed evangelical support in South Carolina to win the GOP nomination in 2000 over John McCain and performed even better among white evangelicals on Election Day 2000 than Reagan had. In 2004, Bush received greater white evangelical support than any presidential candidate on record. White evangelicals supplied nearly four in 10 Bush votes.
What Reagan and Bush knew was that the Christian Right was too small a force to nominate its own nonestablishment candidate but too large a force to ignore or offend. This year, Romney is acting likewise, attempting to persuade the Christian Right that he has seen the light on abortion and gay rights. At last week's debate, Romney went furthest in speaking the language of the Christian Right, declaring he "won't apologize to anybody for becoming prolife" (unlike Giuliani), that he opposed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research (unlike McCain) and that he thinks the American family is "the heart of the Republican Party" (unlike Giuliani or McCain).
Romney's also meeting with evangelical leaders, even sending them wooden chairs mounted with plaques declaring, "You are welcome at our table anytime." Last weekend, he gave the commencement address at Pat Robertson's Regent University.
Of course, Romney's Mormonism makes him a tougher sell to the mostly evangelical Christian Right. But with the two other Republican front-runners staking their independence from Christian conservatives on some key issues and the true Christian Right candidates stuck at 1 percent in the polls, Romney sees his opening. And if it is another candidate who winds up winning the Republican nomination, he will need to prove that, when it comes to the Christian Right's role in presidential politics, the math has changed.
Dan Gilgoff is a senior editor at US News & World Report and author of "The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War." 
