Mitt listens to Nevadans' concerns

ELKO, Nev. — Here in one of the most rural areas of the nation, people scrape a livelihood from the sagebrush landscape, and the issues that drive voters often relate to that same land.

During an early morning town-hall meeting Monday before a standing-room-only crowd at Great Basin College, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney had a first-hand sampling of northern Nevada residents' concerns.

Ranchers want pastures to graze their cattle, and miners want to extract resources from the surrounding mountain ranges. Nearly everyone in the audience cared about secure borders, nuclear families and a strong military.

What they didn't care much about is a person's religion, although they do weigh their core values and willingness to listen to their unique concerns.

"Americans want a president who is a person of faith," Elko resident Mason Simons said after Romney's speech. "I don't care if the person is a Catholic, a Jew, a Protestant or a Mormon. I just want them to have conviction to their beliefs."

Romney did not have to address the "Mormon question" during the town-hall meeting, although the topic of religion did come up during a news conference following the event, when a reporter asked about Romney's thoughts on the separation of church and state.

"The principle of separating church and state has served us well as a nation, but it can be taken to an extreme," such as when people try to remove "In God We Trust" from American money, Romney replied. "It's appropriate as a country to recognize a supreme being, but we shouldn't promote any one religion."

Romney's answer, as well as other comments during his speech, demonstrated his apparent plan to minimize the religious debate in the campaign. While he did mention "my church" at one point, he never made any statements that referred to specific Mormon doctrine.

Instead, he focused on core values that reflect the thinking of most conservative Christians, such as an opposition to abortion rights, the preservation of traditional marriage, and limiting children's access to pornography and violence.

Ryan Erwin, a Las Vegas-based consultant who is helping Romney with his Nevada campaign, said that Romney "is not running away from it, nor is he running to it."

Romney's religion is not much of an issue in independent-minded Nevada, according to Erwin. Primarily, the voters he is targeting are more concerned about his willingness to listen and his ability to lead.