Romney Returns To The Public Eye, Religion and Law – More…
The Book was released this week and with it Romney went public. The Tour does not really start until next week as this week has been consumed pretty much with sticking around New York and doing so much media that one could have mistakenly thought he already was president. I have been in New York all week myself and managed to miss him at every turn, but then its a big place for such a small island.
I think the best summary of all the media was, unsurprisingly, by Kathryn Jean Lopez.
If you had any doubts about who he is, you’re seeing the real thing now. Watching Mitt Romney on the No Apology
And if a social issue hits his desk — based on his Massachusetts record — he’s going to do what he can to preserve families and life. (And that, by the way, makes a huge difference. We don’t, for instance, have such a person in the White House right now. And it can have a chilling effect: in executive orders, in the courts, on staffing, in health care, etc.) tour thus far, he’s talking about what he wants to talk about, what moves him: being a Mr. Fix-It businessman — on the economy, on diplomacy, on health care. He wants to do this because he believes America is great and should and can continue to be. He appreciates — in a firsthand and in a practical, sociological way — that families are the building block of a great country, and he sees how good policies help them. And that’s what he wants to talk about.
[...]
That, I believe, is the No Apology big picture: This is Mitt Romney.
She accuses him of making “dorky” jokes, and she’s right. Here’s some video. Even “The Hill” got into the dorky joke act. Can’t be too dorky if they keep getting repeated this way.
And speaking of video, it is boutiful with all this media. The Hannity interview, courtesy “ComMITTed to Romney”, was one of my favs. But that same interview was used to “prove” flip-flopping by some lefties. Romney is answering two different questions, not flip-flopping in the mash-up. I don’t think I need to break it down for you, but if I do, leave a comment, we’ll be happy to ‘splain.
On the right, the big issue confronting Romney is Palin, populism, and the tea party movement. There were some interesting takes from the Economist and Allahpundit. Which takes us back to K-Lo’s comments. Romney is Romney, which means populism is not what he is about – smart, capable and pragmatic is. What happens in the next few years is going to be based on which direction the nation, and Republicans go, not Mitt Romney.
But Sadly, The Mormon Thing Seems To Be Coming Back With Him
Says David Brody, who is pimping an appearance by ROmney at his media outlet:
Mitt Romney, who is clearly positioning himself for a 2012 run at the White House starts his book tour this week.
The book is called “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.”
Despite the rumor, it is not called “Mitt Romney Goes Rogue”. That’s Palin territory. And it is not called, “I’m a Mormon. Deal With It.”
I think Brody is trying to be funny there, but he is missing the mark pretty badly. Joel Campbell at Mormon Times points out a couple of other examples where Romney can’t escape the issue. Campbell opens his comments by linking to the USAToday piece that Lowell commented on last week. That seems to be happening with Campbell now and then – picking something up that we have commented on and expanding it slightly. (Just thought we’d remind our loyal readers who is in the lead here.)
But the most egregious Mormon shot came, again unsurprisingly, from Newsweek. (Serious readers of this blog will remember that in our comprehensive review of ’08 we named Newsweek as the most egregious example of beating the Mormon drum in the MSM.) The photo essay by Newsweek seems to go out of its way to drive home a single message – “Romney is Mormon.”
Mormons do not talk about Evangelicals like myself this way, I really do wonder why Evangelicals are compelled to do so?
But the most interesting development on this front is from a small post on an Evangelical discussion blog I routinely haunt. Remember that somewhat controversial “Christ and the constitution” painting – well, some obvious leftie thought it needed “improvement.” The original painting is indicative of the newly emerging issue between Mormons and Evangelicals, but this “parody” should emphasize that we have far more in common than we do differences.
And Speaking Of Those Commonalities…
JFK’s now famous Houston speech was considered a centerpiece for religious tolerance when he ran in 1960. This week, Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput delivered a speech at Houston Baptist University criticizing and refining the Kennedy approach to religion and governance. (HT: Hugh Hewitt) The criticism:
Fifty years ago this fall, in September 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate for president, spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. He had one purpose. He needed to convince 300 uneasy Protestant ministers, and the country at large, that a Catholic like himself could serve loyally as our nation’s chief executive. Kennedy convinced the country, if not the ministers, and went on to be elected. And his speech left a lasting mark on American politics. It was sincere, compelling, articulate – and wrong. Not wrong about the patriotism of Catholics, but wrong about American history and very wrong about the role of religious faith in our nation’s life. And he wasn’t merely “wrong.” His Houston remarks profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America’s public life and political conversation. Today, half a century later, we’re paying for the damage.
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For his audience of Protestant ministers, Kennedy’s stress on personal conscience may have sounded familiar and reassuring. But what Kennedy actually did, according to Jesuit scholar Mark Massa, was something quite alien and new. He “‘secularize[d]’ the American presidency in order to win it.” In other words, “[P]recisely because Kennedy was not an adherent of that mainstream Protestant religiosity that had created and buttressed the ‘plausibility structures’ of [American] political culture at least since Lincoln, he had to ‘privatize’ presidential religious belief – including and especially his own – in order to win that office.”6
In Massa’s view, the kind of secularity pushed by the Houston speech “represented a near total privatization of religious belief – so much a privatization that religious observers from both sides of the Catholic/Protestant fence commented on its remarkable atheistic implications for public life and discourse.” And the irony — again as told by Massa — is that some of the same people who worried publicly about Kennedy’s Catholic faith got a result very different from the one they expected. In effect, “the raising of the [Catholic] issue itself went a considerable way toward ‘secularizing’ the American public square by privatizing personal belief. The very effort to ‘safeguard’ the [essentially Protestant] religious aura of the presidency . . . contributed in significant ways to its secularization.”
But t comes with a warning:
The vocation of Christians in American public life does not have a Baptist or Catholic or Greek Orthodox or any other brand-specific label. John 14:6 – “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” – which is so key to the identity of Houston Baptist University, burns just as hot in this heart, and the heart of every Catholic who truly understands his faith. Our job is to love God, preach Jesus Christ, serve and defend God’s people, and sanctify the world as his agents. To do that work, we need to be one. Not “one” in pious words or good intentions, but really one, perfectly one, in mind and heart and action, as Christ intended. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “I do not pray for these only, but also those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (Jn17:20-21).
We live in a country that was once – despite its sins and flaws — deeply shaped by Christian faith. It can be so again. But we will do that together, or we won’t do it at all. We need to remember the words of St. Hilary from so long ago: Unum sunt, qui invicem sunt. “They are one, who are wholly for each other.”9 May God grant us the grace to love each other, support each other and live wholly for each other in Jesus Christ – so that we might work together in renewing the nation that has served human freedom so well.
There Were Several Trial Balloons This Week…
Somebody, and I am pretty sure it is not Mitch Daniels, is trying to get Mitch Daniels to run. He got a big mention from Mona Charen, Ross Douthat mentioned him twice, even Ed Morrisey got into it. This is too much to be idle speculation. Someone is running a whisper campaign and trying to test the waters – maybe leverage Daniels into something. My opinion, if someone is not interested in the job- let them be – the demands are simply too great for someone not to jump in wholeheartedly.
There is also talk of Jeb Bush. I like Jeb, but he and Romney are pretty friendly and unlikely to go head-to-head. Further, the leftie opposition to the name Bush needs a few ore years to loose its edge before Je would have a prayer.
Religion Under Fire…
This is kind of weird, but the bottom line is this – religious people are typically not so smart, and Roney is smart, which means, a) he is not that religious, and b) the religious people that pretty well control the right won’t vote for him. Yep – it may be the most high-handed insult ever thrown my way.
Maggie Gallagher points out that thing really are getting out of hand:
New legislation now being proposed in the Massachusetts state legislature to ban circumcision of any male children, including Jewish children, comes very close to saying, “Yes, it should be a crime.” Circumcision of infant males has been a requirement of Jewish faith and identity since the time of Abraham.
Meanwhile, just a year ago this week, two very powerful state legislators in Connecticut proposed a bill that would have had the government take over the finances of the Catholic Church. (It took a rally drawing thousands of folks to the state capitol to persuade them to withdraw the measure.)
And in the UK, things are even worse:
Traditionalist bishops and peers fear that vicars could be taken to court and accused of discrimination if they turn down requests to hold civil partnerships on religious premises.
Their concerns have been raised following a landmark vote by peers that will allow the ceremonies for same-sex couples to be held in places of worship for the first time.
Which takes us back to Chaput’s speech. If we do not unite, across religious boundaries, religion will simply be legislated out of existence. My religion, your religion, their religion. That’s where we stand.
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CarlH on 04 Mar 2010 at 10:13 am #
The Sam Adams Alliance (I wonder if they may quibble with my use of initial capital letters–is that a populist thing too?) has just published study of the Tea Party movement, which includes results from some in-depth interviews of leaders (whatever that may mean in this context) included a question about current presidential preferences, and while Sarah Palin is a big favorite in this small sample with only 33 respondents (36.4% named her), the news is not all that bleak for Mitt Romney (who came in at a strong second tie–with “waiting to decide/none of the above”–at 27.3%, and way ahead of fourth place Mike Huckabee at 15.2%, and the 12.1% for Bobby Jindal and Jim DeMint who tied for at the fifth spot):
The Early Adopters: Reading the Tea Leaves
The report has other good news (from my perspective), as well, including that the leaders of the movement are very skeptical of a third-party approach–but I still worry about their “troops” (and some of their supporters in the alternative media).
As an aside, what was that incredible Southern Baptist Convention piece doing on Townhall at all, let alone at this particular time? Coincidence? I’m much too close to the issues here to be objective, but my paranoid evil twin at least thinks he smells a rat.
coltakashi on 04 Mar 2010 at 3:47 pm #
Re: The blog post you cited, about a study that alleged that liberals are smarter than conservatives, and atheists smarter than religious believers, demonstrates how dumb people are about intelligence.
Even if the hypothesis of a correlation between intelligence and political views, or intelligence and religious views, had any validity, the example of Mitt Romney (cited by the blogger), who is both very intelligent and very religious (he was a Mormon bishop and then the president of all congregations in Boston), as well as moderately conservative, demonstrates that the hypothesis has no predictive value in any practical situation.
Liberals and atheists want to be able to say that, because of their politics or their lack of religious belief, they are smarter than people who are conservative or religious, but that does not follow. Any particular religious or conservative person they are trying to compare themselves against could be another smart, religious conservative like Mitt Romney. So if a liberal or an atheist tries to assert that those who disagree with them only disagree because they are less intelligent, the liberal or atheist is demonstrating a LACK of intelligence.
A recent survey showed that believing Mormons in the US self-identify as “conservative” about 65% of the time, so here is a population that is very conservative and very religious in terms of devoting a good share of their time each week to their churches–Mormons have no professional clergy, all the positions at the local level are filled by uncompensated part-timers, including bishops of congregations–yet indicators of intelligence like education level, SAT scores, work in technical fields, etc., show that US Mormons as a population are at least average or above for all those factors that directly reflect what we usually call “intelligence”.
For example, a recent survey of religious belief and attitudes toward religion among college professors indicated that Mormons are represented in academia at about twice their percentage of the US population. Additionally, other studies have indicated that, among Mormons, there is a positive correlation between higher educational level and religious devotion. Because of the lack of a clergy career path, senior leaders among the Mormons tend to be people who have succeeded in other professions, whether in business, law, medicine, science and engineering, or academia. Among the top 15 leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one is an MD/PhD who did pioneering work in developing heart-lung machines to allow open heart surgery, another is a nuclear engineer, four are former college or university presidents, several others have graduate degrees in law or education, and one is a jet pilot and former VP for Operations for Lufthansa. The unpaid volunteer who heads my local congregation is a PhD mathematician. And so on.
One commonly accepted indicator of intelligence is facility in a foreign language. among Americans who are not native speakers of non-English languages, Mormons have the highest incidence of speakers of foreign languages. This is made explicit in statistics for the BYU student body. As was demonstrated during the 2002 Winter Olympics, a person can stand on a street corner at lunchtime in Salt Lake City and ask for help in any of 50 languages, and expect to get an answer within 30 minutes or less. (I have answered such pleas for help in Japanese.) If a company needs a computer software designer who speaks Ukrainian, Tagalog, or Mandarin, the first place to go is the placement office at BYU, University of Utah or another Utah college.
There is no indication that US Mormons are, on average, any less intelligent than the US population generally, even though all measures of religious devotion show them to be more religiously devoted than most other Americans, and they are much more politically conservative than the mean of Americans. The hypothesis that was the basis for the blog post would assert that Mormons must therefore be measurably less intelligent than average Americans, but that is precisely NOT the case. The 6 million or so US Mormons is a far larger sample than the one in the study that claimed to find the correlation of intelligence with liberalism and less religiosity, so I would suggest that the study contradicts simple known demographic facts.
There are tremendous variations in religious beliefs and levels of personal behavioral commitment to such beliefs. There are also wide variations in the doctrines taught in various denominations. There are also variations in political views that are much more complex than an overly simplified “liberal to conservative” linear scale. Social conservatism is not international assertiveness “neo-conservatism” is not “fiscal conservatism” is not libertarianism. Additionally, religious and political commitments vary over a person’s lifetime, in a way that intelligence or IQ is not supposed to. “Religion” and “conservatism” are not well defined enough to even make a self-consistent hypothesis that applies to all varieties of both terms, let alone to propose any kind of correlation, positive or negative, between them and “IQ”.
And then there is the entire question of whether conventional IQ is positively correlated to wise judgment on public policy questions. The rejection of dependence upon the judgment of the “smart” versus the judgment of the mass of citizens is the difference between American democracy and the socialism that assumes that elite experts exercise better judgment than the affected citizens. That precise issue is at the root of the struggle for power between the courts on the one hand and the elected legislatures and popular referenda on the other. As William F. Buckley said, many of us would rather be governed by the first hundred people in the phone book than by the Supreme Court.