Values Voter Summit shows support for Bachmann

This weekend, the Family Research Council is sponsoring the Values Voters Summit. The summit will bring prominent figures of the Republican Party in to address voters, and to emphasize the importance of voting to improve American values this coming October. Michele Bachmann spoke on Friday, delivering an address reiterating her campaign platform and riling up the crowd with issues of "life, on marriage, on family, [and] on
religious liberty."

Major participants in the Summit were the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, and the American Family Council. Throughout her speech, Bachmann addressed many issues relevant to the aforementioned organizations and expressed her personal views on gay marriage, abortion, separation of church and state, and "dismantling bureaucracy", as she says. The groups to which she is obviously pandering will be a very important voting bloc for Bachmann, especially if she continues escalating or even just maintaining the level of her religious and values-oriented rhetoric, which she employed heavily in her address to the Values Voter Summit. She referred heavily to the greatness of "knowing the Lord" and pronounced the decision she made to "radically abandon myself and my life and my future to Jesus Christ."

Josh Lederman of The Hill, a publication based in Washington D.C. writes that "while the candidates will likely emphasize their conservative credentials to appeal to the social conservatives, it could make it much harder for them to inch back to the center if they win the nomination and face a general election, where they will have to win over more centrist voters... But Perkins said there’s no reason to worry that Values Voter could push candidates too far to the right." (See the rest of the article here: The Hill - GOP candidates take on social issues) With that in mind, the role of the Values Voter Summit attendees and voters like them is a very supportive one, where candidates are trying to establish rapport with them in order to secure firm backers in the future. However, the candidate who advances to the general election will either have to learn to adjust to not only organized groups like those listed above and appeal to a wider voter-base, or gain all of the support from their largely politically active fans and simply out-mobilize moderates and liberals. The former does not seem likely for candidate Michele Bachmann, who is very good at reaching specifically organized groups with values resembling her own, and said in her address to the Summit, "Don’t listen to these people who every four years tell you we have to select a moderate from our party and we have to settle for the sake of winning. I am here to tell you, we are going to win, not - this year we don’t settle. We’re going to win the White House." For Bachmann, it's too late to turn back. She has promised her devoted backers that she will continue to represent the rightest of the right, which will be a very difficult promise to uphold when she faces voters like the protesters from the Southern Poverty Law Center who set up a news conference outside the Values Voter Summit in efforts to call "values voters" out on their "hatred" of gays.

All in all, the organized groups present at the Values Voter Summit are fairly representative of the groups that Bachmann is targeting in her goal of gaining a devoted following. However, her competition with Rick Perry for the evangelical vote or the "values voters" vote will divide the voting bloc she is counting on, and her refusal to budge on far right ideologies will alienate her from various other prospective support organizations. Bachmann's success in the primaries and possibly the general election will depend on which organizations she is able to win over and how many of them she will lose to Perry's similar socially conservative, yet slightly more moderate.

The transcript for Bachmann's address to the Values Voter Summit can be found here: TIME - Bachmann Values Voters transcript