Not Much To Talk About Today – Thankfully
The trend continues, we have little to discuss today.
Huck Under Fire . . .
When you play identity politcs, your going to catch a lot of stuff. He is under fire from some Catholics for his association with noted anti-Catholic bigot John Hagee. He also caught a lot of heat from Professor Bainbridge for his comments on conforming the constitution to God’s word.
On the radio show, Hugh Hewitt had Bainbridge on and defended Huckabee. I am between these two guys. Huck should be kept in context and his comments were unwise, even politically suicidal, but they do not stretch as far out-of-bounds as Bainbridge asserts.
On the other hand, Huckabee has left himself wide open for the kind of attack that Bainbridge makes – identity politics are a loser. Period. End-of-statement. I must confess to a visceral dislike of Huckabee because playing the game the way he has will be a setback for the things I really care about. His support of amendments to defend marriage and undo Roe, based solely of reference to scripture, will work against reasonable argument to get that done. His candidacy, though backed by people who claim to care about life and marriage above all, will, in the end, hurt those causes. That is just a crying shame.
Going Underground…
Mention of “the Mormon thing” is, as we have noted, increasingly unacceptable, but that does not mean the prevailing attitude that drives the talk has left. The foreign press is still all over it. Consider the Times of London and The Australian.
Most interestingly to me is that the most liberal paper in all of Great Britain has “connected the dots” on Romney’s campaign strategy to take a religious angle. The NYTimes reports Romney traveling from South Carolina to Nevada. The Guardian sees him running home to the Mormons somehow. Yes, Nevada borders Utah, but the population of Las Vegas exceeds the entire rest of the state, and while there is a strong Mormon presence in rural Nevada, I don’t think there are many Mormons dealing cards in the Vegas casinos. The demographics just do not hold on this bit of spin.
Getting Ugly…
Reader/commenters have recently sent us links to some very ugly websites. We will tell you about them, but we will not link, just as soon not give them the traffic. One is addressed “cannottrustromney.com” but when you arrive it is headed “Trust Huckabee.” The Trust Huck people have been noted as anti-Mormon bigots in this space before. One of the many reasons identity politics are not good for the nation is they give pure bigotry a place to hide. We are seeing this increasingly in Huckabee’s wake. He is trying, impotently, to distance himself from this kind of stuff, but it’s just too late – he played this hand in Iowa where he should have folded.
But uglier still is “www.exposemittromney.com,” this site is simply full of lies – there is not other way to put it. Lies in the political realm and lies in the religious as well. Their blogroll features “important links” to creedal Christian “anti-cult” ministries, revealing the real motives. What makes me sad is that despite their claims to want to “…witness Jesus to those lost in Mormonism…” they are just making enemies. How can anyone of any religion hope to bring in true converts on the basis of lies. This is sad, and it is truly sad that it is being impinged on a presidential election.
The Press Can’t Resist . . .
In Iowa, it seems that the press got the religious war they wanted: “Evangelicals against The Mormon.” But, as the sparseness of this Reading List testifies, it appears to be over. This nation as a whole has a huge distaste for such things. But they seem to like the story too much, as this piece from The Street.com and this from CNN testify.
But this keep bringing me back to what we read in Time on Monday:
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’s Mormon 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 just too easy for them to try and gin up the kind of public displays we saw in Iowa than do the hard work of digging up and following trails like this. It is a shame. If we really want to overcome bigotry in this nation, we have to do that hard work. The press claims to be serving the nation….
Making Me Cringe…
Byron York says Romney was authentic in Michigan unlike the prior contests. Now, there is something to that I think, but one is forced to wonder why people did not get Mitt before? What kind of role did his faith play in people’s suspicions? What kind of role will it play? I would love to see Frank Luntz do some focus grouping in the wake.
Lowell: I think one really interesting dynamic to watch for the rest of Romney’s candidacy will be the news media treatment of the “too perfect” meme. Just for fun, Google “Mitt Romney” and “Stepford.” I suspect we will see more of that, emanating from the discomfort of MSM writers and others who are simply uncomfortable that a man can be so successful in so many aspects of his life. (I have a hunch that some of Romney’s GOP opponents dislike him for the same reason.) As long as I am making predictions, I’ll add that many, probably on the left, will tie the “too perfect” meme to Romney’s Mormonism. We’ll see if I am right.
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JLFuller on 18 Jan 2008 at 10:06 am #
There will always be low rent sewer dwellers in politics and religion. But we should not give them more credit for influence than they deserve. For example, exposemittromney dot com reaches only 400 viewers each month according to Quantcast. cannottrustromney dot com’s stats are so low they do not register. Huckabee’s delusion about being God’s candidate early on set him up to fail. If he didn’t win he either looked like a fool or God didn’t like him much in the end. And we all know God loves us everybody.