When the dust settled and the noise died away, Mitt Romney won the Values Voter straw poll.

 
Having covered the campaign season to this point, I figured that Romney would do well at this event, and his nicely tailored speech to the meeting the previous evening didn’t hurt him. Add the fact that Romney’s never spared a dime in trying to tip the results of these straw polls, and I knew he would be a factor. After all, he dumped millions into guaranteeing a straw poll victory in Iowa, and even as far back as March was busing in supporters to prevail in the CPAC poll.

 
But for some reason, I thought the Values Voter Summit would be different. I surmised that the ex-Massachusetts Governor would not be able to smuggle in enough people to influence these most socially conservative of activists, the ones who’d expressed apprehension at Romney’s numerous flip-flops over the course of his different campaigns, and the one whose Mormon faith tends to spook some people.

 
So when Tony Perkins revealed that Summit darling Mike Huckabee had finished second, the room fell silent as Romney’s name was revealed as the winner.

 
Final tallies showed that Romney earned just short of 1600 votes (1595) to Huckabee’s 1565. A slim margin for sure, but a result that left a lot of people scratching their heads.

 
After all, Huckabee had just addressed a boisterous standing-room-only crowd a few hours before, and a ‘wave’ of motivated Huckabee devotees swarmed the voting booths shortly after his final word.

 
Did Romney really carry that much strength?

 
Only hours after the results were announced did we discover that the figures were a bit skewed. It turns out that Huckabee carried the on-site vote count, taking over half of all the votes cast, but Romney’s efforts to influence FRC members voting on-line apparently paid off. So it seems Romney had ‘cooked’ the results once again.

 
The voting public will need to decide if it matters how Romney won, but several themes emerged from the Values Voter Summit. First, the movement is starting to converge behind a couple candidates, as was predicted by Tony Perkins just a few days before. Second, the social conservative wing of the Republican Party doesn’t appear willing to sacrifice its core beliefs in order to support the outwardly more nationally ‘elect-able’ Rudy Giuliani.

 
The popular media conducts nationwide polls that show Giuliani as the leading Republican in a hypothetical match with Hillary Clinton. But as was correctly pointed out by the afternoon’s featured speaker, Laura Ingraham, it will take a candidate who’s able to unite the three main groups of conservatives in order to forge a winning coalition (social, economic and security/strong military conservatives).

 
And it looks like Romney’s starting to gather them.

 
Skewed straw poll results aside, Romney’s got the money and organization to prevail in next year’s primaries. He may still be polling nationally in the high single digits, but his campaign is banking on early victories in states where he’s running ahead to gain the momentum to take him to the convention in Minneapolis.

 
Huckabee has proven to be the favorite of the voters he’s been able to reach. He’s fond of saying that his campaign is ‘trending upward,’ and for the most part, that appears to be true. But without the money to finance a full-scale campaign, he’s probably going to have to settle for the consolation prize – the adoration of Values Voters.

 
Another emerging theme is the deflation of Fred Thompson. Thompson finished fourth in the straw poll, but you also have to believe most of his support came from people who didn’t attend the conference. Thompson’s speech was so uninspiring that I didn’t hear from a single person who said they were voting for him.

 
It’s not hard to see why Fred waited so long to get in the race, since even a month and a half into his campaign, he’s having a hard time honing a message to present to conservatives. Ronald Reagan may have been an actor, but he’d spent a couple decades in politics before assuming the presidency.

 
Ladies and gentleman, Fred Thompson is no Ronald Reagan. It’s almost sad to watch him after the hype build-up prior to his announcement. More astonishing is his standing in the polls. So what’s going to cure that? No one can say. In an era where the media steers the general voting public towards the most newsworthy of candidates, Thompson’s got face and name recognition, so he won’t be going away no matter how uninspiring he is.

 
As mentioned above, ex-Reagan Administration speechwriter and radio talk show host Laura Ingraham put some thoughts together for the Values Voters in the final full-length speech of the meeting – and perhaps she provided some summation of the state of the conservative movement.

 
Ingraham said she’s been traveling the country (promoting her latest book), and in talking with conservatives in all corners of America, she agrees that there’s much hand-wringing over what to do about the upcoming election. 

 
Her advice? Alluding to a scene in the movie Moonstruck, she simply said “snap out of it,” meaning it’s time for conservatives to stop the worrying and take action.

 
“Don’t bury your head in the sand, because that’s exactly what the elites of both parties want you to do,” Ingraham said. “A brokered Republican convention will only guarantee a Clinton election.”

 
Nothing that we didn’t already know, and she further said a potential third candidate rebellion by conservatives would serve to achieve the same result.

 
But she also argued that it would be insane not to nominate a candidate who could bring the movement together.

 
With a final call for conservatives to maintain their principles in the face of the party elites who are telling us to ‘compromise’ in order to achieve consensus, Ingraham urged everyone to stay the course. “Fighting for your values is why you’re here.”

 
For the candidates, she advised: “Don’t drop your views because you think you’ll gain votes.”

 
All in all, Ingraham was entertaining and inspiring. Her message was somewhat mixed in that she was encouraging conservatives not to bolt from the GOP, but also to stick to our principles.

 
Core values were hardly in short supply at the Values Voter Summit. Several leaders of the conservative movement dispelled any notions that people are giving up. But you also don’t get the feeling that anyone feels comfortable with anointing one candidate at this point, and it’s also hard to see if the masses will support someone like Mitt Romney when it comes time to do the work and contribute the resources to forge a winning campaign.

 
If I had to predict at this moment, the GOP’s ticket looks like Romney/Huckabee. Both have numerous questions about their past records, but both have strong appeal to the differing factions in the conservative movement.

 
In any case, one man didn’t have much presence at the Values Voter Summit, George W. Bush. There were few references to the president, and very little direct criticism. But it’s also clear that no one wants to continue the Bush Administration’s direction.

 
In conclusion, the Values Voter Summit was both informative and inspiring. While conservatives may not agree at present on the right man to lead them, the principles that bonded them together in the first place seem to be intact.