Stumping For God's Endorsement - Valuing Voters

The following piece was produced by the Huffington Post's OffTheBus project.

On October 19 - 21 several GOP presidential candidates will attend the Values Voter Summit in Washington DC (see slide #1), and also the Victory 2008 forum sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition, (see slide #2), on October 16. As I try to be a smart shopper, I compared the packages offered by each group, (see slides #3 & #4), and with a top level price roughly five times lower you get a far better value for your dollar out of the Christian event than the Jewish one; everyone loves a bargain - right?

At the time of this writing Brownback, Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, Romney and Thompson have agreed to participate in Victory 2008. No other candidates were invited to participate which seems to indicate that this contingent of the Jewish vote has made some choices. They have not yet endorsed a candidate but, obviously, have chosen those that they will not consider or who they do not believe have a real chance.

The confirmed candidates who will appear at the Values Voter Summit are McCain, Brownback, Huckabee, Hunter, Romney, Tancredo and Thompson. Absent from this list are Giuliani, Paul, Cox and Keyes. This is interesting because several of the candidates who will attend have skipped previous events sponsored by this coalition. Additionally, several of those who are not attending did participate in previous coalition events.

I found out about these events by happenstance rather than from any candidate email or website.. Not one candidate - even those with faith-based email lists - emailed to notify me about this event. This confused me; I was shocked that at least one candidate did not make me aware of it. Perhaps the onslaught of religious vote courting I expect is still to come. I can only assume that this faction will get their time in the sun closer to the actual primaries. That was evidenced by the lackluster attendance at the Values Voter debate, (see slide #5), on September 17: Thompson, Giuliani, McCain and Romney did not attend. Much to my surprise, and then amusement, Thompson came in ahead of two candidates that actually were there. I'll leave it there.

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Comments

[rdalew]

Jennifer
your articles are succint and still somehow in-depth & informative, spinless, humor-tinted

definitely information i would not be getting for myself; interesting, important

THANK YOU

look forward to future articles
RDale