Article VI Blog

Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah, has resigned as Obama’s ambassador to China.  This has caused all sorts of speculation that he will run for president in 2012.  (Well, except this guy who I think has a point.)  Obama is apparently peeved and playing hardball.  So what happens if there are two Mormons in the race?

Conventional wisdom is Huntsman will sap Romney’s “Mormon base.”  Some think it also helps him because it puts someone firmly left of Romney in the race.  Honestly, I think it is too early to tell.

I would hope that if Huntsman gets in the race, the Mormon issue will not be discussed in polite company to any level.  Such bias can be disguised behind other issues when there is just one in the race, but when there is more than one it will have to surface where it can be dealt with or it will have to go truly and deeply underground.  Just imagine Huntsman and Romney double teaming a Huckabee, if he dared….

And yet, the buzz has begun.  WaPo looks at the Mormon numbers from last go around, stating:

Amid swirling attention on U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman’s (R) potential candidacy, there is sure to be renewed focus on whether Americans (but first Republican primary voters) are ready for a Mormon president.

I find myself incredulous at the audacity.  This has not been a story while Romney, the very Mormon around whom these numbers were developed, has been putting himself in a much better position to run at the moment than Huntsman – and yet Huntsman is the excuse for the story?  And in another piece, that same newspaper declares 2012 the “Year of the Mormon!”  I see my hopes from a mere paragraph ago being rapidly dashed.

And now that The Question has seen the light of day it is beginning to creep up in other places as well.  Politico finally acknowledges something that we wondered about yesterday: the fact that Iowa is the one place where The Question really mattered in 2008:

For Romney, Schmidt said, “the Mormon issue is an issue, even if it’s unspoken, and it’s not going to go away unless he converts to Pentecostal.”

A quote that makes me wonder who has the problem, the Mormon or the Pentecostals?

It seems the press is not at all adverse to being as biased against two as they were against one – that really is shameful.  Regardless of how this plays out, if I’m Mitt Romney I am liable to end up ticked off at Huntsman.  Mere rumors of Huntsman running have revived talk of an issue that had been pretty well laid to rest.  Huntsman’s presence in the race also takes advantage of all the groundwork and extraordinary flak-taking that Romney endured in 2008.  By virtue of having suffered those slings and arrows last time, Romney should be entitled, if he wants it, to enjoy full benefit of the ground thereby won.  A Huntsman campaign would be most opportunistic, and somewhat disrespectful of the enormous price paid by Romney.

Lowell adds . . .

Well, isn’t this interesting?  The mainstream, legacy news media are showing their provincialism, not to mention what I called here “an embarrassingly unsophisticated understanding of the Mormon vote and its significance to Romney as a base (of sorts).”   There are just over 6 million Mormons in the USA, about the same number as the Jewish population in America.  Of those 6 million Latter-day Saints, about half claim active affiliation with the church.  So we have 3 million individuals scattered across the country who claim to take their Mormon faith seriously, and perhaps half of those are voters, most of whom are concentrated in the Western USA.  And Romeny and Huntsman are going to fight over those votes?  And the outcome of that battle is going to make a difference?  And it’s going to be a serious fight, even though Huntsman has no organization, no fund-raising network, and no experience in a national campaign, while Romney has all those things in spades?  If you believe all that, I want to talk to you about a great deal on shares in a bridge spanning the Great Salt Lake.

Like the Atlantic’s Joshua Green, I wonder if “Huntsman really doesn’t have his eye on 2016, not 2012, even if he runs.”  In fact I don’t wonder at all.  I’m pretty certain that is what Huntsman is up to.  Or maybe Ambassador Huntsman hopes to be in someone’s cabinet – even  Romney’s.  After all, Mitt’s father George ran against Richard Nixon, then wound up as HUD Secretary under that president.

John makes a great point above:  Romney was the modern trailblazer for Mormon national candidates.  Yes, his father ran in 1968, but Mormonism was not an issue then, largely because the big national social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage, for example) had not burst onto the national scene, and significant Evangelical involvement in politics (Jimmy Carter on the left, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on the right) were still almost 10 years away.  Here’s an example of what  Mitt Romney accomplished in the 2008 cycle:

[T]he percentage [of voters] turning away from a Mormon candidate dropped significantly – by 13 percentage points – between Dec. 2006 and Dec. 2007. Over this same time period, the percentage of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents saying being a Mormon was of no consequence rose 11 points to 72 percent, as the percentage less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate dropped from 36 to 21 percent. Numbers also dropped among white evangelical Protestants, 26 percent of whom said they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate in Dec. 2007 (down 10 points from the year before).

I am not sure I agree with John that Romney may be unhappy with Huntsman for stirring up The Question again.  My guess it that to the extent Huntsman calls attention to his Mormonism – and to Mitt’s – the more the issue will become old hat to the electorate, if not to the MSM.

Hmmm….Now that I think about it, if Huntsman’s entry into the race actually helps Romney, isn’t there a possible conspiracy theory we can work here?  I mean, we have two Mormons, and one is entering the race and perhaps pretending to be serious, while his real intent might be to serve as a stalking horse and help the other Mormon….

Nah.

Posted in News Media Bias, Political Strategy, Religious Bigotry | 3 Comments » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

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