If you read the popularity polls, and/or listen to all of the “smart people” (i.e., the self-proclaimed and MSM-nominated political pundits) and the Elite of both political parties, Mitt Romney is the man to beat for the Republican Nomination for President of the United States.

Romney is presently in first place in fund-raising in all the polls which the MSM chooses to print.

Republican strategist Doug Heye is certainly singing his praises:

Certainly that is where Mitt Romney is now. He’s running really a strategy as a front-runner. He’s not engaging the other candidates. He’s focusing his attacks on Barack Obama. I think that’s smart

Smoke and Mirrors.

Americans in the Heartland do not like Romney. They don’t trust him.

Unfortunately for the guy in the white dress shirt, driving the pick-up truck, the Republican party is not just made up of Fiscal Conservatives (i.e., Moderates).

In order for Romney to grab the brass ring, he will have to earn the trust and admiration of Christian Conservatives and the Tea Party movement.

According to Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party organization:

My prediction would be is that somebody is going to fill that vacuum, the true fiscal conservative in the race.

Kibbe said that Tea Party activists are not just staring out their windows, waiting on the perfect candidate:

We’re not waiting. We’re shopping.

Last month, FreedomWorks held a planning session where 150 participants were asked to choose a candidate to run for president in 2012. Only one Tea Party activist at the meeting chose Romney.

How come? Simple. Americans know the successor to Bob Dole and John McCain when they see him.

Conservatives will never embrace the socialized state medical plan known as RomneyCare. And, instead of distancing himself from it, Romney has defended it, over and over again.

Per Kibbe:

If anything, he has doubled down (on health care).

Now, if you listen to some Republicans, who identify themselves as Evangelical, they’re still in mourning that Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is not running:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, proclaimed:

No question Mitt Romney benefited from Huckabee not running. That left a huge vacuum.

Perkins says that while Romney is appealing to many social conservatives, there are still concerns over the contradictions (flip-flops) in his political history.

It’s fair to say there are those who see his record when he was governor of Massachusetts as not consistent with the platform that he ran on four years ago.

A lot of Reagan Conservatives throughout America’s Heartland are coming down with a case of deja vu:

It seems to be 2008…all over again.

Romney leads the field with 35% of the vote, in the latest WMUR poll in New Hampshire.

If you go back to a poll conducted by WMUR in July 2007, Romney was way out in front with 34%.

That is why, to average, God-revering, freedom-loving Americans, here in the Heartland, it appears to us that the Grand Old Party is trying to pull a fast one…again.

The overwhelming majority of Americans want a Reagan Conservative in the White House…period.  The want a president who is strong in all three areas which define a Reagan Conservative:  Fiscal Conservatism, Social Conservatism, and National Defense.

Lately, on the Internet and around the water cooler, there seems to be a push by a vocal (and, at times, an I’m-smarter-that-you-Christianists) minority, who are claiming that all the perfect presidential candidate for the GOP needs to be is a Fiscal Conservative (i.e., Moderate/Libertarian/or just downright Liberal).

The future existence of the United States of America cannot sit on a one-legged stool.

President Ronald Reagan spoke eloquently about what has to be done, and what it will take to make it happen, at his first Inauguration on January 20, 1981:

We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding–we are going to begin to act, beginning today.

The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we, as Americans, have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.

From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

We hear much of special interest groups. Our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and our factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we are sick–professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “We the people,” this breed called Americans.

…Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.

I am told that tens of thousands of prayer meetings are being held on this day, and for that I am deeply grateful. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer.

…Directly in front of me, the monument to a monumental man: George Washington, father of our country. A man of humility who came to greatness reluctantly. He led America out of revolutionary victory into infant nationhood. Off to one side, the stately memorial to Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence flames with his eloquence.

And then beyond the Reflecting Pool the dignified columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln.

Beyond those monuments to heroism is the Potomac River, and on the far shore the sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row on row of simple white markers bearing crosses or Stars of David. They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom.

Each one of those markers is a monument to the kinds of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, The Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno and halfway around the world on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam.

Under one such marker lies a young man–Martin Treptow–who left his job in a small town barbershop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire.

We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, “My Pledge,” he had written these words: “America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”

The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the kind of sacrifice that Martin Treptow and so many thousands of others were called upon to make. It does require, however, our best effort, and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds; to believe that together, with God’s help, we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us.

And, after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans. God bless you, and thank you.

No.  Thank you, Mr. President.