by Sandy » Fri Jan 20, 2012 11:27 am
The celebration that must have taken place in President Obama's campaign headquarters yesterday should have been something. The people who are working on putting his campaign together must be ecstatic. They will have very little work to do in terms of finding weaknesses to point out about whomever his opponent might be. Gingrich's little surge in the polls in South Carolina may be indicating a long, drawn out, hard fought campaign to win the GOP nomination, which would weaken whomever they nominate. The fact that Santorum actually won Iowa puts pressure on Romney, who no longer has a "streak" going for him. And then here comes one of Newt's ex wives, dropping a gigantic bomb. Whatever negative effect Clinton and John Edwards have had on the political fortunes of their party is over.
So, for conservative Evangelicals who "vote their values," you have
Rick Santorum, a practicing Catholic who accepts his church's theological position that all other Christians who aren't Catholic are apostate
Newt Gingrich, a confessed adulterer whose response to his past is to ignore it because it happened over 10 years ago, rather than to repent and ask forgiveness,
Mitt Romney, a member of a religious cult which shares almost nothing in common doctrinally with Christianity, the poster child of the richest 1% evading paying their income taxes,
Ron Paul, compatible from a religious perspective as a respectable Southern Baptist, but also a libertarian whose economic policies are the exact opposite of what the wealthy and the corporate interests want.
Of course, there is also the option to support President Obama, whose policies haven't even come close to being the "socialism" or the "welfare state" that right wing talk radio screeches and flaps its lips about. He's bent over backward, even to the point of endangering core support from his own party, to work with the GOP. His daughters attend a private, Christian school, and he's shown a preference for a Washington, DC Baptist congregation when he goes to church, or the Navy Chapel. He is nothing like the extremists in right wing talk radio try to paint him, but they're not above lying or exaggerating to win if they have to. Not only that, but, golly gee, darn that growing economy and shrinking unemployment. The stock market has soared over 12,000 points (which the GOP said it would never do under Obama) the number of unemployed and underemployed is shrinking by the day. He's well over a third of the way to his goal of having $1 billion at his disposal for re-election.