Why Do It Yourself When You Can Have Surrogates Do It For You?

We brought up bigot and Huck supporter Gary Glenn on Friday, and he keep popping up because Michigan is his playground. CNNPolitics was all over the story:

“We laid the groundwork,” says Gary Glenn, one of the leaders of the movement. “The fact that he’s even in a position to threaten Mitt Romney in his native state is a real statement to the depth of support he has here.”

Groundwork!? Groundwork!?!?! How about sowing the seeds of religious prejudice? But interestingly, these things have a way of backfiring. Many protestants that have this big a beef against Mormons have them against a lot of other religious groups as well, particularly Catholics. Jonathon Martin maps that Huck had a big Catholic problem in Iowa:

That Mitt was stronger in this part of the state and Huck better off in evangelical-heavy western Iowa was known even before the votes for cast. It wasn’t just religion — Romney had worked eastern Iowa hard and had a good base of support there.

But the correlation between Huck’s losses and Catholic counties is so precise that it can’t be completely ignored. Catholics in places like Dubuque, Iowa, are just as anti-abortion as Huck. But did they not go for his overt emphasis on faith?

As we have said all along - Huck cannot win on this stuff, all he can do is spoil things for Romney. The question is why would he?

The NYTimes has managed to look a little deeper into the Huck/religious thing and come up with something I have feared for a long time - youth. Putting it frankly, many of the people putting the energy into Huckabee are too young to remember Jimmy Carter.

This is the problem with identity politics. Voting for the candidate “most like me” generally means someone less than capable gets the job. I know I lack the ability to perform up to standards in the White House. Almost all of us do if we are honest about it.

Besides, It’s Backfiring…

From a TownHall blog:

What is most ironic about the continued Huckasurge from evangelicals is that evangelical leaders are the ones who threatened to abandon the GOP in the general election if a pro-choice nominee such as Giuliani were to end up being the nominee.

[…]

It is time for the evangelical Huckabee supporters to understand that Economic & Fiscal conservatives now get to make the same threat that Evangelicals made earlier.

That pretty well defines the nature of politics - compromise and alliance. Huckabee’s efforts to carve off a piece of the party, based on religion or anything else, cannot win. It’s pretty doggone simple.

And from the BYU newspapaer, a letter:

Recently, Gov. Mitt Romney was tacitly forced to go before the nation to assert that the LDS Church would hold no sway over his possible presidency.

[…]

Who is more likely to pander to their church? Romney, a member of a church with 4 million American voters, or Huckabee, a member of a religion with 80 million American voters widely known for dominating Republican politics?

Get your speech ready, Gov. Huckabee. You have some explaining to do.

Boy, there it is directly. You know, that might be a great tactic for Governor Romney, to call out Huckabee to do a speech on religion. For one, I don’t think Huckabee could help himself, he would keep deeply theological, and secondly, while he is a great communicator, he is not presidential, and that would show in spades.

K-Lo points to a NYTimes piece featuring a Riichard land quote:

Richard Land, the top public policy official of the Southern Baptist Convention, argued that just as small-government and foreign-policy conservatives could not win a primary without evangelicals, “I don’t think evangelicals can win without most of the rest of those coalitions.”

There it is folks, in spades. Play this way and you are going to lose.

Evan a creedal Christian pastor in the heart of Mormon country gets it.

Debating Huck…

Peter Augustine Lawler from Ashland University defends Huckabee’s religious appeal.

Governor Huckabee’s appeals to religion aren’t so different from those of King or Lincoln.

I must disagree on two grounds. The first is best expressed by Mark Levn in The Corner yesterday:

Huckabee continues to use his faith as a weapon against those who question not his faith, but his political populism — much of which he shares with secular progressives. And he is clearly hoping to stir up resentment among Evangelical Christians against the other elements of the conservative movement and Republican Party as a way of encouraging them to vote in the caucuses and primaries.

On the political level there is nothing uniting or diverse about Huckabee’s approach. But it is also true on a religious level. Plausible deniablity notwithstanding there is the Jesus/Satan brother crack and the actions of so many of his surrogates and supporters. Since that crack Huck personally has stopped the negative stuff, but he has not repudiated his own action nor has he tried to stop the actions of his supporters nor repudiated them if he is unable to stop them. It must be remembered that Lincoln was far from a traditional orthodox Christian and MLK took much of his philosophy of public action, even public action based on his personal faith, from the Hindu - Gandhi.

Huckabee is using religion divisively, not inclusively, and that dear friends is the difference - and that is what matters.

Well, there certainly is some out-and- out hatred out there…

Ugly Example Lowell: This ranting, paranoid screed would be caricature if the subject matter were not so serious. What was it Mark Twain said? “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.“

And some of it is going to backfire seriously in the end. This links a hate-commented YouTube of Joel Osteen declaring Mormons Christians. Osteen pastors the largest church in the nation and I have ALL SORTS OF theological beefs with the guy. Frankly, theologically, I think he is as wrong as Mormonism is, but that is kind of the point. The point, both theologically, in that the word is defined on a spectrum, and secondly, it’s a big “so what” in an election cycle.

Besides, Bigotry Can Hide A Lot Of Places…

A Gail Collins Op-Ed in the NYTimes:

Unfortunately, there’s something about Romney’s perfect grooming, his malleability and his gee-whiz aura that seems to really irritate both the other candidates and the voters. “Most Americans want the next president to remind them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off,” says a Mike Huckabee ad running in Michigan. (It doesn’t tackle the follow-up question of whether most Americans would like the guy they work with to be handling nuclear proliferation.)

[…]

What bothers voters about Romney, as it turns out, is not his Mormonism but his inherent Mitt-ness.

At the height of Donny-and-Marie mania does anybody remember discussions of how creepy they were being that nice? I do, and in the privacy of the cloisters of church, etc. that was always code for “Mormons trying to make themselves look good because they really are, well, you know….”

But at the heart of this is a desire to hold Romney’s success against him. Instead of viewing that success as a sign of qualification, it’s a handicap? I don’t think so.

Lowell: I’ll just say that an awful lot of Mormons were dismayed that the Osmonds were portrayed as representative of our faith’s culture, and found them downright corny. By all accounts the Osmonds are good, sincere people, but they were an act, for heaven’s sake, and the people in the act happened to be Mormons. Is Jerry Lewis representative of Jewish culture?

As for Romney’s “Mitt-ness,” I hate to say this, but perhaps many in the MSM would be much more comfortable with Romney if he had been known to dismiss a U.S. Senator, in a large meeting, with an obscenity– like McCain has; or if Romney tended to swear like a sailor, like, well, McCain. That might reassure the poor ink-stained wretches that Mitt’s just like them, and would not remind them quite so starkly of their own shortcomings. As Mark Twain also said, “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”

In Other States…

In Florida, Guiliani in church quoting scripture. Not out of bounds here, and if not Mitt, then Rudy, but come on Mayor - go with your strengths - this is NOT one of them.

Politico looks at what should be a false dichtomy ion South Carolina:

“Huckabee is a Christian and he seems to be a bona fide Christian,” she says as golf carts ferry in parishoners from the parking lot. “We have to have someone who is guiding our country that is listening to God.”

But in almost the same breath, she then uses the word “experienced” to characterize McCain. “And I think he’s right on as far as the military is concerned. We’ve got to have somebody with guts,” Cantrall adds.

“McCain, bless his heart his heart, he’s been there. … He’ll do what he can do to destroy them.”

Competition between two of the modern Republican party’s most essential impulses — strength on national defense and conservative stands on issues of values and faith — have seldom been put in starker relief than in the McCain-Huckabee showdown here.

It seems to me that this should not be a choice, that my faith should allow me to vote for the best person for the nation and the prominent issues. I don’t like John McCain much for the presidency, but I will agree he is a whole lot better than Huckabee on national security, but do you see where identity politics are getting us…?

They play dirty in South Carolina anyway, as reported by Time:

Other attacks have become so common that they rarely make the news. For months, Republican activists in South Carolina have been bombarded with anonymous emails and mailers, many of which have taken aim at Romney’sMormon faith, which remains a concern among some of the state’s evangelical voters. One mailer, delivered for the holidays, appeared to be a Mormon Christmas card. “We have now clearly shown that God the Father had a plurality of wives,” the card read, before falsely claiming it had been sent by the “Romney family” and paid for by aMormon temple in Boston. Dawson, of the state GOP, turned the mailer over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the hopes of a mail fraud investigation.

It is that opening line that I find most troubling. The MSM shrugs at bigotry. Is that really where we are as a nation - the nation that fought the Civil War, the nation that had the Civil Rights Movement? Pervasiveness makes right? Forgive me, I am a bit disgusted…

Some General Reading…

Scott Adams, yes THAT Scott Adams - the Dilbert guy, writes on religion and politics.

The religious left whines.

GetReligion dissects that thing from The NYTimes magazine weekend before last. I find it fascinating that in all that deep analysis, there is no discussion of political ramifications. For example:

This argument — all religions are equally implausible — seems to be rising in popularity in our multicultural postmodern milieu.

There are two problems that come to mind. One is that it assumes that plausibility of a religion is based solely on individual assertions of divine revelation.

Actually the first view is a restatement of the proposition on which church/state issues in this nation are predicated. - there is nothing “post-modern” about it. Secondly, it has nothing to do with the revelatory nature, or lack thereof of religion, but with its supernatural content.
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