It's subtext. Romney's too clever to lay it out in stark terms, but the whole gist of the speech is "if you don't vote for me, you're an anti-Mormon bigot". In fact, that's the only reason the speech was given at all, so that Romney could try to play the "victim card" of religious persecution.
I also fail to see what was so "amazing" about the speech (perhaps because I only read the transcript as opposed to hearing it). Romney says in it basically what at least half the field has been saying for much longer, and he never seems to really address the fundamental misgivings some people seem to have about his religion, preferring instead to insinuate that anyone who dares take his religious beliefs into account is a bigot.
Couple that with a totally specious "Article VI" argument that dishonestly tries to conflate prohibitions against a government proscription of a religious test with the right of the individual to use whatever criteria he sees fit to evaluate a candidate, and I consider the speech a total failure.
Perhaps folks are responding on an emotional level to the delivery rather than the content. I can hardly expect objectivity from the Romney cheerleaders, but I am surprised to see other observers taken in by the presentation without seriously reviewing the content and meaning of the speech itself -- this article is one of the few that does take a hard look at what Romney actually said rather than just rave about how good it sounded, and his analysis agrees with mine.
So perhaps I'm biased too -- after all, we always give more credit to those who agree with us -- but I stand by my analysis.
OK. I think the speech was to give evangelicals a reason to support him, not to club them over the head for not doing so.
The fact that James Dobson didn’t see an attack on evangelicals in the speech tells me that at least it wasn’t an obvious one. Dobson is known to be pretty in tune with that sort of thing, to a fault according to some members here :-)
Given that the media and the democrats are truly attacking evangelicals (just look at the questions about “creation” and the smirks about the answers to that and the “is the bible true” question), I think we should focus on the real attacks, not perceived ones.