I certainly didn’t see Romney’s name mentioned in the article. Maybe you’re seeing things.
Conservatives were shocked when Keene endorsed Romney in 2007. Now we know why.
http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/keene_endorses_romney/2007/11/29/53324.html
“”Dave Keene, president of The American Conservative Union, has endorsed Mitt Romney for president. The endorsement is a pivotal moment in the 2008 campaign.
Keene, who endorsed Romney on Thursday, tells Newsmax that Romney is a “good conservative” and “the best of the bunch.”
A bulwark of the conservative movement, Keene has headed the ACU, the country’s oldest and largest conservative grass-roots lobbying group, since 1984. With 1 million members, the ACU runs the Conservative Political Action Committee’s (CPAC) annual conference in Washington and publishes an annual Rating of Congress — the gold standard for ideological assessments of members of Congress.
Among conservatives, no one is more highly respected than Keene. As second vice president of the National Rifle Association, he will automatically become president of the organization in three and a half years.
Deal Clincher
Keene’s endorsement is likely to galvanize fellow conservatives in Romney’s direction.
For some time, Keene had been discussing issues with Romney, but he had not issued an endorsement because he is friends with some of the other Republican candidates. Romney clinched the deal with him when they met in St. Petersburg for two hours the day before the Republican debate, Keene said.
“Romney spent most of Tuesday preparing for the debate; then at the end of the day, we spent a couple hours together; and then afterward I had dinner with his campaign manager Beth Meyers and Peter Flaherty who was his deputy chief of staff as governor, and Al Cardenas, who is one of my very closest friends,” Keene said.
Jeb Bush’s former finance chairman, Cardenas is on Keene’s board and chairs Romney’s National Hispanic Steering Committee.
“I had basically come to the conclusion that it is coming down to a race between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney,” Keene said. “And the reason I decided to break my neutrality, which I’ve maintained from the beginning, is that the Mike Huckabee surge in Iowa could easily derail the Romney momentum that he’s going to need to break through what Rudy Giuliani calls his firewall in Florida before the big primaries. And I therefore think it’s important that conservatives who think that Romney is the best of the bunch and are concerned about the impact of a Giuliani nomination on the conservative coalition and the general election, have to come out now because in essence a vote for Huckabee in Iowa is a vote for Rudy.”
Despite being friends with many of the candidates, Romney and Fred Thompson were the only two that he really considered supporting....””