Talk about "whistling past the graveyard" with your comment. You say that an individual endorsement is more important than a group with chapters in ALL 50 states (3,000 to be exact) with MILLIONS of members and supporters. This will likely be the turning point in the race for the White House, but you say it doesn't carry much weight? I'll bet if Huckabee or Romney had garnered their support that you'd be singing a different tune!! LOL Where did you get the idea that they can only contribute $5,000, btw? Do you know how valuable it will be for all those volunteers to be working for Fred between now and the primaries?
Thank you sir. Great response to the dismissivness of this article. The campaign could not put a dollars amount on this endorsement, in that it involves volunteers from all 50 states.
You got it. This was the endorsement everyone was waiting for and Fred garnered it. It is appreciated and will be to our advantage.
1) Millions of supporters were not polled. My point, quiet simply, is that as an organization with a singular issue focus that is voluntary, whose decision was not made by it's 'membership' (it doesn't have members, it has a mailing list), cannot 'deliver' pro-life voters. These people will make up their own mind. As a strict pro-life voter, I am not persuaded. Neither are a majority of the pro-life voters in NH or IA, a plurality of both overwhelmingly back Romney.
2) The NRLC is not the NRA. The NRA endorsement CAN push it's members more effectively than the NRLC can push it's mailing list. This is old hat for them. But both the NRLC and NRA grasstop leadership has already been picked up by the various campaigns anyway (and his late entry hurts FDT here). This isn't like a labor union endorsement which is a BIG deal in the D primary.
3) The NRLC PAC did the endorsement. Federal law limits them to around a 5k check.
4)
4) I've done enough survey research to know that, to individuals in the first five states or so, being told that a national organization endorsed them has relatively little impact when you ask 'are you more/less likely to vote for candidate X?'
5) Yes, the Romney campaign is a little pissed it didn't get this endorsement because they swing at every pitch. It was probably someone's JOB to make sure this happened and he worked on it like his life depended on it and he failed. Yeah, it sucks. But in the scheme of things...
6) I'd rather have Sen. DeMint cutting TV ads and lending his machine to me rather than the NRLC (getting to the personal versus faceless organization endorsements). Wouldn't you?
7) I was mistaken about IA RTL. I was thinking of their grasstops. My bad, I was wrong.
What is being missed here is the importance of an endorsement from a national abortion abolition organization of this magnitude. The problem with having Rudy Giuliani as a candidate is that, even if pro-lifers are going to take the lesser of two evils and vote for him anyway, they are not going to WORK for him with any degree of enthusiasm.
For decades, the heavy lifting in the GOP has been done by social conservatives. Without people to lick envelopes, walk precincts, make coffee and phone calls, and do all the things it takes to get out the vote, no candidate is going to win.
With the imprimatur of NRLC, millions of pro-life activists now know that they can get out there and work for Thompson with a clear conscience.
If the movement will get behind Fred, we won’t have to worry about choosing between two pro-abortion candidates (the “choice/choice choice.) But we have to be the ones that tell our friends and neighbors, because the media, so far, is not all that interested in covering Fred.