One of the modern era’s great speechwriters has given an assessment of Mitt Romney’s “religion speech” yesterday:

His text was warmly cool. It covered a lot of ground briskly, in less than 25 minutes. His approach was calm, logical, with an emphasis on clarity. It wasn’t blowhardy, and it wasn’t fancy. The only groaner was, “We do not insist on a single strain of religion–rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.” It is a great tragedy that there is no replacement for that signal phrase of the 1980s, “Gag me with a spoon.”

Beyond that, the speech was marked by the simplicity that accompanies intellectual confidence.

At the start, Mr. Romney was nervous and rushed, his voice less full than usual. He settled down during the second applause, halfway though the text–“No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes president he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.” From that moment he was himself.

He started with a full JFK: “I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith, nor should he be rejected because of his faith.” No “authorities of my church” or any church, will “ever exert influence” on presidential decisions. “Their authority is theirs,” within the province of the church, and it ends “where the affairs of the nation begin.” “I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law.” He pledged to serve “no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest.” He will not disavow his religion. “My faith is the faith of my fathers. I will be true to them and to my beliefs.”

Bracingly: “Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it.” Whatever our faith, the things we value–equality, obligation, commitment to liberty–unite us. In a passage his advisers debated over until the night before the speech, Mr. Romney declared: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.” He made the call. Why? I asked the aide. “Because it’s what he thinks.”

At the end, he told a story he had inserted just before Thanksgiving. During the dark days of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, someone suggested the delegates pray. But there were objections: They all held different faiths. “Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot. And so together they prayed.” At this point in Mr. Romney’s speech, the roused audience stood and applauded, and the candidate looked moved.

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else.

She’s not the only one who’s remarked that Romney’s speech was curiously absent any reference to atheists. I suspect he didn’t mention them because he knows they won’t vote for him anyway. Significantly — unlike Kennedy, who waded into a roomful of suspicious Baptists — Romney was preaching to the converted, a sympathetic and friendly group of supporters at the Bush Library in Texas.

Kennedy’s message was: “I’m not a papist puppet.” But Romney’s was: “I’m one of you.”

It remains to be seen how well that message got across.

Meantime, there’s another evaluation — less positive — from The Anchoress:

Mitt Romney is an unexciting orator, but he does have an assured manner, so I suspect he did manage to shore up his support among Republicans and religious Democrats in a general way because there was little there to offend any person of faith. Really, the speech was one-part boilerplate, one-part salesmanship and too-many-parts comfortable, “applaud-here” cliché.