Obama’s smear campaign against Romney has given him a 7 point lead. Perhaps out of desperation, Romney is taking a track that gives us a hint his VP nomination. If Romney is going after the paranoid religious zealot vote, as this attack implies, his running mate will have to be a Tea Party approved messenger. Romney can focus on getting the Wall Street and business crowd. His Vice Presidential candidate can play the “holier than thou” attack dog role that will be necessarily to make the Wall Street crowd and the religious zealots continue to believe they have anything in common.
I do not believe this identification with pro-choice people and hatred of religion has ever been a good long term strategy. Many national mainstream religious groups, (e.g. Methodist, Presbyterian, Jewish and American Baptist) have position statements saying that abortion should be safe and legal. When Republicans say that everyone who is pro-choice is attacking religion, it becomes clear that they consider fundamentalism to be the only true version of the faith.
I don’t know enough about electoral politics to know if Obama could have won a campaign focused on the issues, but he came out of the gate slinging mud and the rest of the campaign will go downhill from here.
Today, many Republicans do indeed believe fundamentalism to be the only true version of the faith. I am reading,” written by Frank Schaeffer and he warns about just how extreme the GOP has become. The GOP is now dominated by fundamentalist Christians, some of which believe all the Old Testement punishments must be imposed on America. In addition, they want to replace the Constitution with The Bible as our governing document. I believe that if they ever got full control we would see women executed for abortions and government centers to hold women who its feared are considering an abortion. We may even see our last free election as I believe the would restrict voting only to fundamentalist Christians. The GOP is already attempting to keep likely Democrat voters from voting.