Friday, February 09, 2007

Fox News All Stars   [NRO Staff]

From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On Pelosi’s Plane Problem—

FRED BARNES: I'd say . . . she deserves a plane that can fly there nonstop if we've decided that the number two person in line, the speaker of the House, needs this kind of security . . .

She's handled this very, very poorly. I mean, she suggested for one that she's being discriminated against because she's a woman. She suggested that Donald Rumsfeld still has a desk at the Pentagon and he's getting retribution. And then, really very crudely, having Jack Murtha, the congressman and her pal, call the Pentagon and lean on the Pentagon to get her this plane, and then Murtha suggests that maybe the Pentagon should do it because she has such control over Pentagon spending that they shouldn't be rejecting her request.

—On Romney and the Evangelicals—

NINA EASTON: [Romney is] studying how John F. Kennedy dealt with the religion issue when he ran as a Catholic, and I think there's some differences here. Kennedy went before the nation and said, “Look, you know, the pope's not going to control the country if I'm elected, A. B, I believe in separation between church and state,” a very kind of intellectual look at, you know, electing a Catholic. The problem for Romney, I think, is not just with Christian conservatives but, in this day and age, it becomes part of your personality. It’s a personality issue.

MORT KONDRACKE: Well, it's going to require some work on Romney's part . . . Kennedy-style speeches and lots of contact with Evangelicals to demonstrate that he's their kind of guy and that his Mormonism is not weird, that . . . he's not going to take orders from Utah and stuff like that, and I think he can do it.

BARNES: Mort and Nina have this exactly wrong. Look, Christian conservatives are not much of a problem at all for Romney.

The New Republic, on the other hand, really a secular liberal magazine attacking him for his faith, saying people who have qualms about him being president because he's a Mormon, they're entirely justified and at one point in this article said that it's — “Mormonism will remain a theologically unstable and thus politically perilous religion.” This is the liberal New Republic.

Everywhere that Romney has gone, when he's talked to Christian conservatives, they've always reacted favorably to him, and so I don't think they're going to be a problem. He has other problems, being from Massachusetts and flip-flopping on issues. Those are problems for him. I don't think this is going to be a problem at all in the primary.

02/09 10:39 AMShare