Steven Benen at Talking Points Memo observes that the conventional wisdom among our betters in the Beltway is that Mitt Romney must address the “Mormon Question”.
National Journal conducts a weekly “Insider’s Poll,” which, as the name implies, questions DC players about political stories of the day. As the WSJ noted, the poll is “generally a good reflection of conventional wisdom among strategists, lobbyists, consultants, pollsters and party operatives inside the Beltway.”
This week’s survey asked insiders: “Does Mitt Romney need to address the issue of his religious faith the way that John F. Kennedy did in 1960?” The results showed that 59% of Republicans, and 44% of Democrats said, “Yes, and soon.”
Robert Novak recently noted the same trend. “Although disagreement remains within the Romney camp, the consensus is that he must address the Mormon question with a speech deploring bias,” Novak wrote a couple of weeks ago. “According to campaign sources, a speech has been written, though much of it could still be changed.”
Benen points out that Romney has a bigger problem than Kennedy, who merely had to pledge that he would respect the separation of church and state. Romney’s target audience believes in the merger of Church and State. They just don’t want it merged with his particular heresy. They don’t want to hear him say that he’ll respect constitutional boundaries. It’s therefore fairly difficult to figure out just what would mollify them.
Poor Mitt. The people who care the least about his particular brand of religion are all on the other side of the political divide. It’s fairly irrelevant to me, for example. I consider Romney’s brand of delusion only slightly more absurd that your generic Christian “faith tradition”, only because its of more recent vintage.
Poor Mitt for another reason. It’s hard to believe that he has a deep seated belief in his variety of religious experience. I base this on the fact that he doesn’t really seem to have any fixed principles at all. You may say that makes him the same as most politicians, but in fact Mitt has taken the concept of flexible principles to new heights. It is possible that someone has run a more cynical campaign for president, but I doubt that anyone doing so has come as close as Mitt to actually getting nominated. So he probably doesn’t give a flying **** about Joseph Smith or Moroni or any of that other crap. He just wants to be president. It would be so convenient for him if he could just pose as a secular minded guy who happened to be born Mormon but isn’t really into religion.
Unfortunately circumstances leave him in a bit of a box. He’s Republican, therefore he must be devoutly religious. But he’s a Mormon, i.e., a heretic, and even he isn’t cynical enough to think he can get away with changing religions (at least that drastically) in order to please the base. (But see, contra, John McCain’s conversion from Episcopalian to Baptist). So heretic he must stay, in a party in which fealty to a they-know-it-when-they-see-it Orthodoxy is required.
The Republican race is fascinating since every candidate is repellent to a large segment of the party’s base. That’s perhaps the only way in which the Republican base resembles the nation as a whole Still, one of them has to get the nomination. It’s just so hard to see how any of them can. Even the potential saviors (Newt, Fred Thompson) fall flat. Makes you think that the nomination won’t be worth much to whoever gets it. It’s going to be a monumental challenge for the Democrats to lose this one.
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