Riding with Romney: an interview with the candidate about his salient problems.

MITT ROMNEY is in a hurry. His meet-and-greet in Charles City, at the Floyd County Museum, went a little long after organizers decided to hold it in the museum's tractor annex, where Romney could speak to supporters surrounded by antique tractors made by the Oliver Farm Equipment Company, the now-defunct manufacturer of the first internal-combustion tractors in the United States. Given that Romney is the man who chose to announce his candidacy standing in front of an old car, a new car, and a vintage airplane, it was guaranteed he would want a look at the big green machines.

That takes a little time. But another group of supporters is waiting for him 30 miles away in Mason City, and at this moment, Romney's black SUV is gunning it down Highway 18, hitting 80 miles an hour on a road where it's not unusual to be stopped by the cops for doing much less. But Romney is lucky today, and he arrives at the Mason City Country Club in time to treat the crowd of about 120 mostly older supporters to ... a PowerPoint presentation.

There are lots of charts, graphs, and bullet points, all on the subject of trade. "Training, Assisting And Empowering U.S. Workers To Succeed In The New Economy," reads one screen. "Opening Markets Fuels U.S. Prosperity," reads another. "You Can't Be For Protectionism And For Iowa's Farmers And Exporters," reads a third. Some screens are crammed with detailed maps and lots of figures.

"I find these charts interesting," Romney tells the group. "You may be bored to tears, but I love some of these things." No one is in tears, but at the very least it's not the kind of presentation that is interrupted by applause, and as he goes on, Romney makes more self-conscious references to the possibility that the audience might be nodding off. This stuff is a great cure for insomnia, he says at one point. At another he frets, "I may have entirely sucked the oxygen out of the room."

The screen fills with a hard-to-read map of what Romney calls "Reagan Zones of Economic Freedom" bubbling up all around the globe--it vaguely resembles one of those old VH1 pop-up videos--and a bit more oxygen goes out of the room. But this is Mitt Romney, the famously data-crunching businessman, doing what he loves best. If the election were decided on stuff like this, he'd win in a landslide.

But in Iowa, as well as the other states that vote early, Romney is fighting on more uncertain turf. Propelled by millions of dollars in advertising, he's been leading in Iowa for a long time, but in the weeks before the January caucuses he faces three serious challenges. One, he must allay the nervousness some GOP voters feel about his Mormon faith. Two, he must convince them that his conversion to the pro-life cause is genuine and permanent. And three, he must persuade them that he is the most electable conservative in the race, the true representative of what he recently called "the Republican wing of the Republican party."

The morning after the PowerPoint session, in the back of the SUV traveling--more slowly this time--from Des Moines to Fort Dodge, Romney talks with me about all three issues. During the conversation his demeanor ranges from confident to analytical to testy. He's coming to the pressure point in his campaign, and he's done virtually everything right so far. But he knows, as the clock ticks down, that he hasn't yet finished the job.

EDEN IN MISSOURI

These days Romney is receiving advice from all sides on whether to deliver The Speech. That refers to an address modeled on John F. Kennedy's 1960 talk to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which Kennedy addressed what he called the "so-called religious issue" of his Catholicism. Today, various polls have suggested that between one-quarter and one-third of the electorate would at least hesitate to vote for a Mormon, and in the SUV I ask Romney what he plans to do. At least for now, he says, the speech is a no-go.

"Maybe a speech would be helpful at some point in some setting, but at this stage I don't see a particular requirement or need or value to that," he tells me. A short pause. "But that could change." I ask whether, as some scuttlebutt has it, the speech is already written and is just waiting for the right time. "No, no," says Romney. "If it's going to be written, it will be written by me."

One reason he doesn't feel the speech is necessary, Romney explains, is because he already has plenty of opportunities to talk about Mormonism. "I give that speech almost every day," Romney tells me. "I'm asked questions about my faith and I answer them. I was just recently on Bob Schieffer's program [CBS's Face the Nation], and in the first ten minutes he asked questions about my faith and I answered them. I didn't duck any of them."

While it's true that Romney doesn't duck questions--he tells people they're free to ask whatever they want--it's also true that he doesn't always answer them. For example, in the CBS interview, Schieffer asked him, "I'm told that the Mormons teach that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri. Is that correct?" Romney answered: "You know, they're probably the right folks to give you the answers to questions related to a bunch of Mormon teachings. So I'll probably let them respond to questions about specific doctrines." From there, Romney went on to explain that the values of Mormonism are "founded on Judeo-Christian principles" and that Mormonism shares many fundamentals with other faiths. It was a textbook example of Romney's strategy: stress the general similarities between his religion and others, and don't discuss the details of doctrine.

No one has any serious concerns that Romney, were he president, would take orders from the Mormon Church. Rather, the uneasiness about him stems from what some Americans consider the sheer strangeness of Mormon beliefs. The question that most bothers some of Romney's would-be supporters is whether a Mormon is a Christian. Church officials say yes, pointing out that the name of the church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But a number of evangelicals--even some who support Romney--say no. "As a Christian I am completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism," the Rev. Bob Jones III said recently in a statement endorsing Romney. "I'd be very concerned if he tried to make it appear in any of his statements that Mormonism is a Christian denomination of some sort. It isn't. There's a theological gulf that can't be bridged." (Jones went on to say that he was choosing a president, not a preacher, and that Romney best represents "conservative American beliefs, not religious beliefs.")

In the SUV, I bring up a statement by Rep. Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina, who recently recounted a meeting he had with Romney. Inglis told him, "You cannot equate Mormonism with Christianity; you cannot say, 'I am a Christian just like you,'" according to an account of the conversation by Bloomberg News. "If he does that," said Inglis, "every Baptist preacher in the South is going to have to go to the pulpit on Sunday and explain the differences."

"Did Inglis say that to you?" I ask.

"I don't know," Romney says. "He may well have."

"You don't recall the conversation?"

"I have a lot of conversations. I don't recall the exact words of people, but if he says he said that, I'll take his word for it."

"What was your reaction?"

"I don't recall the conversation so precisely that I can describe my exact reaction to that."

With lawyerly phrasing like that, it seems clear Romney doesn't want to talk about it. But I try one more time. "Well, okay, if you have been told that by other people, what is your reaction to the substance of what they are saying?"

"You know, the term 'Christian' means different things to different people," Romney tells me. "Jews aren't Christian. That doesn't preclude a Jew from being able to run for office and become president. I believe that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world and is the son of God. Now, some people say, well, that doesn't necessarily make you a Christian because Christian refers to a certain group of evangelical Christian faiths. That's fine. That's their view. Others say, no, anyone who believes in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the savior should be called Christian. That's fine, too. I'll just describe what I believe and not try to distinguish my faith from others. That's really something for my faith to do and for the churches amongst themselves to consider."

It's a cautious, guarded strategy. The only time Romney has let down that guard was in a radio appearance last August with an Iowa talk-radio host, Jan Mickelson, who seemed determined to prove that Romney did not fully abide by the tenets of the Mormon faith. (Mickelson is not a Mormon.) Off the air, but not out of range of a studio camera, Mickelson goaded Romney into an argument in which Romney not only defended himself ("Let me say that I understand my faith better than you do"), but abandoned his practice of avoiding doctrinal details. When Mickelson brought up the Second Coming, an exasperated Romney explained, "The Church says that Christ appears and splits the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. That's what the Church says. And then, over a thousand years of the millennium, that the world is reigned in two places, Jerusalem and Missouri... . The law will come from Missouri, and the other will be from Jerusalem." In spite of himself, Romney had been drawn into doctrine.

It was a remarkable moment, one in which viewers saw a more human Romney than in dozens of campaign appearances. Romney was later surprised to learn that a camera had been running, but after seeing the video--his feistiness was more appealing than his more wonkish speeches--his campaign decided to post it on YouTube.

"You don't show many flashes of anger in public," I say.

Romney laughs. "I call that intensity," he says. "It's just Romney intensity." He tells me the story of his father, George, the governor of Michigan, who had an "intense debate" with a state lawmaker. George Romney was holding the man by his lapels, which ripped in the grip of that Romney intensity. "It may be a bit of a family trait," the son says, "to be very intense and very energized about things you believe very deeply."

'IS THAT SO DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND?'

Most voters who pay attention to the Republican race know Romney's history on abortion. He ran as a strongly pro-choice Republican in 1994, when he unsuccessfully challenged Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts, and again in 2002, when he successfully ran for governor. Then, in late 2004, in the midst of a debate in the Massachusetts legislature over stem-cell research, he changed his mind on abortion, and later, in 2005, wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe explaining that he is now pro-life. Since those changes occurred so recently, and since they came at the same time Romney was beginning to explore a run for president--his political action committee, Commonwealth PAC, was formed in July 2004, a few months before his stem-cell decision--a number of pro-life voters view his conversion with some suspicion.

"Unfortunately, he just has not had time to prove himself on the change that he has made in his statements," Tamara Scott, head of Concerned Women for America's Iowa branch, tells me. "To make them on the road to the presidency is a little concerning." Other Iowa social conservatives I talk to say similar things--one tells me, "He says everything I want to hear, but I just don't have the confidence in him at this point that what he says is really what he believes"--and in the car I remark that Romney still has to convince some voters that he's genuine. "If someone wants to know what my positions are, they simply have to look at what I did as governor," he tells me, "and the record that I have as governor is, I believe, entirely consistent with the record I have as a candidate for president."

"Specifically on the issue of life?"

"Particularly on the issue of life," Romney says. "The first time a bill reached my desk that dealt with life, and the taking of life"--it was a stem-cell measure--"I came down on the side of life. And as I served as governor, several bills had measures that related to life. I came down on the side of the sanctity of life, and at the end of my administration the Massachusetts Citizens for Life gave me the leadership award for my contribution towards protecting human life."

But Romney had seemed firmly pro-choice as recently as the 2002 campaign, and I read him the statement he made in a questionnaire sent to him that year by the National Abortion Rights Action League. "I respect and will protect a woman's right to choose," he told NARAL. "This choice is a deeply personal one. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not mine and not the government's."

"That sounds like a philosophical position," I say, "something that you came to because of your belief in the relationship of people to their government."

"'Philosophical' is perhaps the right term," Romney answers, "in that it's very interesting philosophically to talk about something in an abstract manner, and then when you become governor, philosophy reaches reality. And I was asked to sign a bill that would take human life, and I simply would not do that and could not do that."

"If I could separate stem cells from abortion," I begin to ask.

"You can't, can you?"

"Well, there are laws that deal with stem cells, and then there is Roe itself."

"Well, they both relate to the sanctity of human life."

"But your position was, as far as a woman's right to have an abortion is concerned, that you would protect that and that you believed that Roe should be protected."

"I'm not sure what your question is," Romney says, growing visibly irritated. "I changed my view. Is that so difficult to understand?"

One thing that feeds skepticism over Romney's conversion is his habit of pushing his argument a little too far, of cutting a few corners with the record. Take that award from the Massachusetts Citizens for Life. It was presented in May 2007, not by the state organization of Massachusetts Citizens for Life but by the Pioneer Valley Regional Chapter, which represents the western part of the state. When Romney began to cite it in his campaign appearances, group officials in Boston issued a statement "to make clear that the local award did not constitute endorsement by the state organization." The statement went on to give a mixed view of Romney, saying he had taken "a politically-expedient pro-abortion position," but that "admitting that he was wrong took rare courage." So what Romney points to as the stamp of approval from a pro-life group is really a bit less.

Another example: Recently, the Romney campaign, in response to a rather mild criticism on NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE, sent out a series of talking points to underscore his pro-life record. Among them was the assertion that "Governor Romney Support[ed] Parental Notification Laws and Opposed Efforts to Weaken Parental Involvement." As evidence, the campaign cited an October 2002 Associated Press account of Romney's debate with his Democratic opponent for governor, Shannon O'Brien. But a look at the debate itself shows that Romney, while opposing a proposal to lower the abortion-without-consent age from 18 to 16, spent a great deal of time reaffirming his pro-choice position. On five different occasions, he vowed to "preserve and protect a woman's right to choose." No one watching the debate or reading the transcript could come away with the impression that Romney was anything but emphatically pro-choice. Yet now, he cites the debate as part of his commitment to life.

REPUBLICAN WING, REPUBLICAN PARTY

Steve Scheffler works in a small, spare space in a West Des Moines office park. He heads the Iowa Christian Alliance, perhaps the most influential social-conservative group in the state. When I visit him on a recent Friday, he's amazed at how wide-open the race in Iowa is. He's been working for nearly 38 years in this field, he tells me, and this year, "I've seen less gravitation towards any one single candidate than ever in the past." Romney is strong, but Mike Huckabee is moving up, and the rest of the field isn't out of it, either.

Romney's support appears to be a bit less secure than that of other candidates. David Redlawsk, a professor of political science at the University of Iowa and co-director of the school's Hawkeye Poll of Iowa caucus-goers, tells me that 70 percent of Romney's supporters in the most recent Hawkeye survey say they are at least somewhat likely to change their mind and support another candidate. While no one has set-in-stone support--for Rudy Giuliani, the change-my-mind number is 60 percent, while it is 53 percent for Fred Thompson and 50 percent for Huckabee--Romney seems the most vulnerable.

Everywhere Romney campaigns, he stresses that a winning Republican candidate will have to appeal to all three parts of the Reagan coalition: economic conservatives, national-security conservatives, and social conservatives. In Nevada recently, he irked some of his opponents when he said that he represents "the Republican wing of the Republican party"--another example, perhaps, of pushing things a little too far. In the car, I ask whether he regrets saying that.

"No," he says. End of answer.

After a long pause, he says, "I didn't say I was the only one. I just said you have to have a candidate that represents the base of the Republican party."

In the end, that is the defining question of Romney's candidacy. Will the GOP base, particularly the part of the base that is strongly pro-life and religiously conservative, accept the man who so recently joined them and whose faith strikes some as odd? Romney has done everything in his power to persuade them. But it's the kind of question that can't be quantified, can't be bullet-pointed on a PowerPoint screen. He'll just have to wait for the answer.

BYRON YORK

Northeastern Iowa