Here's Jim Geraghty's addition to his ongoing exchange with Hugh Hewitt:

Look. If Mitt Romney gets the Republican nomination, a good portion of the political discussion in the 2008 campaign is going to center around, “Are Mormons normal?” It’s unfair, it stinks, and in a better world, it wouldn’t happen. But the opposition is going to push every argument they can to paint this faith as too strange for a President, and a significant chunk of the conservative message effort is going to have to be dedicated to refuting that notion. And the more time spent debating Mormon theology is less time spent on arguments about why taxes should be low, why our policies on terrorism should be aggressive, why the border should be secure, why red tape hurts small businesses, why we should get pork out of the budget, etc.

 

We’ve all heard the comment that in politics, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”; I fear that in Clinton vs. Romney contest, the right would be forced to do a lot of explaining.

This is a truly fascinating analysis:  We should worry about nominating Romney because people will attack him for his faith, and that will be a distraction.

Doesn't that rub you the wrong way, just a little bit?

Let's try that analysis out on some other candidates: 

• We should not nominate Lieberman because he'll spend too much time calming the fears of voters over his Jewishness.  This will be worse for him than for some other Jewish candidates, because Liberman's observant and actually takes his faith seriously.
• We should not nominate Obama because he'll spend too much time calming the fears of voters over his race (not to mention his childhood involvement with Muslim education).

Can you imagine such punditry avoiding widespread denunciation?

John adds: What annoys me about Geraghty's notions here is how little faith he has in the American people.  That Romney's faith is the discussion order of the day is largely a product of media and pundits like Geraghty and not the American people.  Why, just last week I was on an airplane with a man that lived in Boston during Romney's term as governor and never knew Romney was Mormon until I told him.   While that is certainly not typical of the chattering classes, I think it quite representative of the mainstream voter.

If Romney's faith is the predominant point of discussion in the general election it will be so because the media puts it there, or more likely because the Democratic opponent puts it to the media who then will put it there.  That scenario is one quite likely to make the average American just a bit disgusted with the Democrats.  The American voting public has grown quite adept as seeing through the media smokescreen into what really matters.  The media may spin the Mormon wheel until it is blue in the face, thus once again consigning themselves to the eventual scrap heap.  While voters turn to the internet and look into what really matters and cast their votes accordingly.

And then John continues:

USNews does a Q&A with Romney and the inevitable finally happens:

How will you deal with criticisms of your Mormon faith?

I have said that time will give us the answer on whether we do a big speech; and then I read Hugh Hewitt's book, A Mormon in the White House? and his conclusion was, don't give a speech, you know it can never be as good as Jack Kennedy's [addressing critics of his Roman Catholicism]. And that's true, and it won't answer the critics. But more recently I am more inclined to [because] there have been comments about my faith that have been inaccurate, and it has become more of a visible issue.

Finally, Romney admits the work that Hewitt has done on this issue, but he must resist the impulse to give a Kennedy speech.  First of all, it is not his role to defend his church against inaccuracies.  Bush's Evangelicalism has been often misrepresented as well; such is just a fact of political life for a religious person of any stripe.  The LDS church has proven quite capable of defending itself against such things.  Not to mention a certain blog that works that topic pretty hard as well.

As to the increased visiblility of the issue, a speech would serve only to increase that visibility, not decrease it.  As Romney says, such a speech would not answer the critics, but it would give them permission to get much louder, much harsher, and much nastier than they have been to date.

The fact of the matter, the nation would have been better served if Kennedy had kept his mouth shut.  His speech was a brilliant bit of campaigning, and went a long way to win him the presidency, but it did not help one iota in placing religion into the proper political perspective - it relegated it to the sidelines.  Romney should chose the high road here and lead by example.

This is where such things will lead us.  Much as it pains me, I must rise to the defense of Hillary Clinton here.  A story of this type would just be better left unwritten.

Mrs. Clinton’s references to faith, though, have come under attack, both from conservatives who doubt her sincerity (one writer recently lumped her with the type of Christians who “believe in everything but God”) and liberals who object to any injection of religion into politics. And her motivations have been cast as political calculation by detractors, who suggest she is only trying to moderate her liberal image.

Such attacks from either side are just wrong.  I am clueless about the sincerity or lack thereof of Hillary Clinton's faith; I am certain it is of a very different shape than mine, but if it provides her with solace and comfort, and Lord knows the woman needs both in spades, then who am I to take that from her?  I might offer her some better alternatives, but to trash her for it is just being ugly.

"is Hillary Clinton a real, genuine Christian?" is little different than asking, "If Mormons are Christians."  Such things are between individuals, their church and their God - they are certainly not questions for general public discourse or the voting booth.

Any speech that Romney would give would only fuel this kind of talk.  If he tried to straighten out misconceptions he would open the door to endless, and likely theological, debate.  I cannot tell you how many creedal Christians tell me what Mormons believe and do, they care not when I tell then "That is not what my Mormon friends tell me."  Lecturing the press and public on what is and is not legitimate political discussion will get him accused of trying to hide something, which will just make them dig harder.  Sequestering his faith, ala JFK, will only feed the "flip-flop" beast which will again come back to "Mormons lie" and it will spiral from there.

Needless to say, I have a great deal of sympathy for Romney in this instance, but all he can do is play defense.  I do think the time may have arrived for him to counterpunch.  His answer to this question is both a probe and a very mild counterpunch.  The last debate showed that the counterpunch works, but going on the offensive is a no-win.

Lowell adds briefly: That Romney himself allows that a speech might be necessary tells us he is thinking about it.  I hope he doesn't make a speech about The Question.  I am beginning to think that some kind of event is needed– maybe a Meet The Press appearance where he can respond to The Question?  But not a speech.  It would be red meat for the MSM, and they would dine on it for the rest of the campaign.  It's just the narrative they want Romney to create for them.

Finally…

If this is for real, Rudy Guiliani has officially disqualified himself from serious consideration in my book.  K-Lo put up a pro-Guiliani video that provides a link to a legitimate Rudy site and the video features the tag line "Rudy - Unattractive, not a Mormon."  Of course, it is quite possible this was not actually produced by the Guiliani campaign (it lacks the requisite "I'm Rudy Guiliani and I approved this ad") and it is, I think, intended to be funny.  It misses the funny mark by a mile and if it is not actually from the campaign they better very publicly demand a withdrawal of the link, and an apology ASAP.

Imagine some pro-Hillary video going up with a tag line "Hillary, She's a shrew, but at least she's not black."  Not so cute now, is it?

K-Lo calls the video "annoying."  She's being kind, it's despicable, and Guiliani better distance himself from it as far and as fast as he can.

Lowell:  I call it bigoted, and something no one would be able to get away with if the word "Mormon" were replaced with "Jew," Catholic," "Muslim," "African-American," "Latino," and so forth.  Rudy has been quite honorable in his approach to such matters so far.  We'll see what happens this time.  What needs to happen is for religion-bashing to become just as unacceptable as those slurs against ethnic groups.  I don't think that will happen in this campaign, but we could take some big steps in that direction.

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