SMACKDOWN!, Thompson and God, Political Calculus, and more…
Things should be much slower on the blog today both because it is the “calm before the storm,” but also because Lowell and I both are going to be on the road – TRAVELING TO THE SPEECH! That’s right, your humble bloggers are holders of some of the highly coveted, very rare, invitations to the speech. We will try to keep the blue box “ticker” as up-to-date as possible and post when internet access is available. We do not anticipate a separate post on speech news today, but we will respond as conditions warrant. Stay tuned.
CNN’s Jack Cafferty: Ready, Fire, Aim!
Lowell has this one:
Jack Cafferty has long been known as a wild-swinging liberal blowhard. Yesterday he outdid himself in this little clip:
“It’s not like [Romney's] a Catholic or a Protestant or a Lutheran or A Baptist.” What?!I always thought Lutherans and Baptists were Protestants. Oh, well, aside from those babblings, it seems that what Jack is trying to say is that Romney doesn’t belong to a mainstream Christian faith, and therefore has a lot of explaining to do. I hate to repeat myself, but . . . what?! Is CNN capable of embarrassment?
Unlike Cafferty, Ed Morrissey has some thoughtful comments on all this.
John chimes in: Does Guiliani need to explain transubstantiation? Does John McCain, reputed Baptist, need to explain the unacceptability of paedobaptism? Does Fred Thompson need to explain snake-handling? (Forgive me that is probably a low blow at religion in Tennesee) Does Joe Lieberman need to explain if the Jews will resume animal sacrifice if the Temple is ever restored? Shall I go on?
What is most atrocious is Cafferty’s singling out of Mormonism for this “special” treatment. That is bigotry in its purest and most distasteful form. Time for someone, maybe even a few someones, to lose their jobs at CNN.
Too Late Huck!
Huckabee once again says religion is not important.
“I don’t think it’s relevant to the presidency. I really don’t,” he said. “You know, I get all these questions about somebody else’s religion. I only want to address the ones about my own, and I think some of those get a little bit almost unfortunately laborious because, you know, we ought to be talking about education and health care and energy independence and all these other things.”
While he said he respects “anybody who practices his faith,” Huckabee said what other people believe — he named Republican rivals Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton — “is theirs to explain, not mine, and I’m not going to.”
Now, note closely that “theirs to explain” crack. Not at all dissimilar to the “one of your own” cracks we heard yesterday. But at the Washington Post, Richard Cohen pens an op-ed that calls Huckabee on similar cracks he made over the weekend:
Pardon me for saying so, but [religion] is the chief difference between the two. On about all the social issues you can name — abortion, stem cells, gun control — Huckabee and Romney are in sync. So their religious differences are not about morality. They are about belief — religious belief, precisely the issue that is not supposed to matter in this country. Huckabee, though, clearly thinks it ought to.
The reason I started with Stephanopoulos is that he provided the perfect opportunity for Huckabee to make some ringing statement in support of religious tolerance. He might have made some reference to the ugly anti-Catholic campaigns run against Al Smith John F. Kennedy (1960) and how they had both been spearheaded by prominent members of the Protestant clergy, Methodist Bishop Adna Leonard in the former’s case, the renowned Norman Vincent Peale in the latter’s. (Peale later went on to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan.) In other words, Huckabee might have preached. Instead, he said Romney had to answer for himself the question of whether he’s a Christian. As for the TV commercial Huckabee is running in Iowa that opens by proclaiming him a “Christian leader,” he said this is just because that’s what he is — not, mind, you, the former governor of a nearby state or even a weight-loss guru. But as he well knew, it is not his surprisingly moderate record as governor of Arkansas that so attracts Iowa’s conservative Christian voters, it’s his obdurate and narrow-minded religious beliefs.
PRECISELY! Huckabee has made religion the issue here. Remember this is the man that claims, ostensibly, to be God’s chosen candidate. It is just way too late for this man who has climbed into view by invoking religion to suddenly claim it to be a non-factor now that he is visible – that is the definition of slick.
Concludes Cohen:
Inevitably, Romney’s speech will be compared to JFK’s. But when it comes to being beholden to a religious doctrine, it is Huckabee and not Romney who has some explaining to do. What’s more, Huckabee is the one who is capitalizing on religious intolerance. He says he’s a Christian leader, but the evidence proves otherwise. He’s really a shameless follower.
That has got to hurt! Cohen, by the way, is no right-winger. This is precisely the kind of boomerang effect of a religion debate that I have feared from the get-go. It is the fringes of the Evangelical movement that are engaged in this stuff that are going to suffer most. If Romney does not get elected, he has cracked the door wider for the next Mormon.
Huckabee, on the other hand, is rapidly slamming the door for Evangelicals.
As another example, consider this little gem from the Atlanta Journal & Constitution:
The difference between Kennedy’s conundrum and Romney’s riddle is that Kennedy could affirm what many Baptists and conservative Protestants then claimed to affirm: the separation of church and state.
“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote,” said Kennedy. “I believe in an America … where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind.”
Such an appeal by Romney holds little sway over the Christian Right, whose leaders reject the separation of church and state. One even said it was “the figment of some infidel’s imagination.”
The left my friends is salivating over this thing. They are hoping beyond hope that Romney hits a homer tomorrow but the rabid Evangelical wing that is behind Huckabee prevents Romney from rounding the bases. Then they can paint a picture of the conservatives in general, and especially religious conservatives, as the dumb, bigoted, “easily led,” morons they have always thought we are. If Romney plays this right he puts the test not to himself, but to those Evangelicals that would oppose him on the basis of their faith.
Bigotry Under Cover?
Some voters are holding Romney’s Mormon heritage against him, rivals and supporters of Romney acknowledge. But a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll shows that his deeper problem is not his adherence to a faith that many conservative evangelicals view with skepticism.
Instead, Romney has not overcome a record of shifting views on abortion and other social issues. His failure to present a clear picture of his faith and its role in his life appears to be just one part of a broader challenge: proving to GOP voters that he is being straightforward with them.
[...]
Some 13% of Republican voters in the Times/Bloomberg poll said Romney’s Mormon faith made them less likely to vote for him, including 8% who said it made them “much less likely.”
But 10% said Romney’s religion made it more likely they would support him. And an overwhelming 73% said it made no difference.
“The religion part has never bothered me,” said poll respondent Jenelle Pritchard, 43, a school administrator from Omaha, who is an observant Catholic and has decided to support Huckabee. “But with Romney, I really don’t know where he stands. You can transform yourself, but why are you transforming yourself?”
Compare those numbers to what we were seeing a year ago – Remember? “Would not vote Mormon” numbers in the 30’s and 40’s. What we are seeing here is the development of a code. What has happened is that people have figured out the illegitimacy of talking about not wanting to vote for a Mormon, so they don’t they talk it, but they haven’t changed their minds. Now they talk about this stuff.
Tell me again how this is not about religion?!
Fred gets it right…
Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson Monday said he didn’t need to apologize for his faith, despite concerns from Christian conservatives that he does not express his religious beliefs enough on the campaign trail.
Fred is right here and the “Christian conservatives” being “concerned” are just dead wrong. Now, I think that number of “Christian conservatives” are much smaller than the press would have us believe, but they make a great target for a MSM fighting to continue the encroachment of secularization into our greater society.
One of the problems that greater Islam faces in this day and age of Islamic terror is the inability of of the peaceful Muslims to stand-up and decry the terrorists. I think we are seeing a similar phenomenon here. The vast majority of Christians in this country are not concerned about Fred Thompson’s church attendance, and they should not let the fringe few speak for them.
Political Calculus/Issues v. Identity…
Hotline wonders if some Christian groups are working to undermine the Huckabee campaign.
When Mitt Romney supporter Jim Bopp said last week that “a vote for any other candidate in the Iowa caucuses is a vote for Rudy Giuliani,” it raised a few GOP eyebrows. It wasn’t just Bopp’s claim, which he followed up with knocks on the electability of Romney rival Mike Huckabee, but rather that he made it at a house party hosted by the Iowa Christian Alliance, a powerful conservative group in the state that has promised not to endorse. His remarks preceded a speech by Romney himself, and they followed a powerful diatribe by ICA president Steve Scheffler — a known Giuliani opponent — who said that the election of the former New York mayor would result in a “bloodbath” within the Republican Party.
You see, identity politics are not smart politics. It is often throwing out the baby with the bath water.
In general…
The “progressive” voice of Vanderbilt University (”You know,” he said humbly, “some of the smartest people I know went to Vanderbilt for at least part of their college career.”) gives Christopher Hitchens, noted hater of religion, serious consideration. Typical of college writing, you have to sort through a lot of chaff to find some actual wheat in there – take this one for what it is worth.
We are not the only ones with religion in politics issues. “Christianphobia” – catchy, we need to make sure we do not create it.
Posted in Reading List | Comment on this post » | 
Print this post
| 
Email This Post