Examing The Question From Yet Another Angle – Analyzing Florida
Well the results are in and Romney wins Florida, and ALL her delegates, big time.
What a 10 days this has been. It started with with both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum receiving heinously anti-Mormon introductory comments at speeches. It ended with Newt Gingrich saying that Mitt Romney had no understanding of religious liberty or conscious, and revelations that Sarah Palin manages her Facebook page in a blatantly anti-Mormon fashion. WOW!
And yet, with all that religious bile spilled, Romney won going away. Well that is except among Evangelicals. According to USAToday exit polling Romney barely edged out Gingrich among those that professed to be “a born-again or evangelical Christian” 38% to 37%. In the words of the immortal Mr. Spock, “Fascinating Captain.” Another curious fact is that Jews comprised a mere 1% of the Republican electorate today. Michael Medved tweeted:
“Koshergate” apparently backfired-absurd Gingrich claim that Mitt denied kosher food to Holocaust survivors!
Medved claimed on a Hugh Hewitt radio interview that “Koshergate” is what kept Jewish Republicans home. This may account for why noted leftie Frank Rich claims:
Rich added, “It’s almost as if he’s closeted about his religion and I think that makes him seem fake.”
People are not truning out because of the religious incivility, so if you’re a leftie – keep ‘em home.
When I went looking for a video of Gingrich’s abysmal post-result speech, I found it here and noted this in the comments:
How Glenn Beck can NOT say that Romney is a progressive is beyond me It must be that Mormon brother hood
So, here’s what we really know. Evangelical heavy South Carolina has a clear distaste for a Mormon candidate. Exit polls and reports from GOTV callers seem to back this up. Evangelicals in Florida don’t care for him much either, but given the much more diverse nature of Florida they don’t matter. Most importantly, Florida looks a lot more like the nation as a whole than South Carolina does.
Everyone seems to think these results are determinative, even if the primary race is not over. So, let’s presume Romney will win the nomination and ask if the religion question can still hurt us if it is played heavily in the primary, as it has been to date. The answer seems to be that it clearly can. Amongst all but the Evangelicals, the religion issue seems to have become distasteful. Amongst Jews, who would have a particularly sensitive set of feelers to religious discrimination, it appears to be driving them away in droves.
Thus the real danger presented by Gingrich’s continued presence in the race, particularly if he continues in the shrill and nasty fashion he has, is that the moderates and independents on whom general elections always lie are going to be turned off to the Republican side of things. Fortunately, there are ultra-left places like Gawker and HuffPo just chomping at the bit to go all “Mormons are weird,” which should act as a counterbalance to that force. However, Obama does not seem to get smeared with the same brush as his media allies nearly so much as Romney will get smeared by a brush that should really only paint Gingrich and his increasingly small band of devotees.
It’s time to corner Gingrich, we simply cannot afford to let him appear to be a part of the Republican mainstream, not if he is going to continue to operate in this fashion. Gingrich’s non-concessionary speech struck me as someone that was trying to get his arms around his particular niche audience. I did not hear third party threats so much as I heard the kind of rhetoric one might expect when trying to build a social network and develop a media career.
I thought when Gingrich got into this thing it was a vanity campaign. He was the beneficiary of a confluence of some extraordinary forces (Perry’s dismal failure coupled with pretty strong anti-Mormon sentiment) and it went to his head – he started to take himself seriously. Tonight I heard a man returning to his original idea, with one notable exception – his audience is not where he thought it was. His audience is amongst the more extreme and less tasteful of our conservative Republican movement. Unlike Huckabee who after catering briefly to this element tacked center, Gingrich is tacking increasingly towards the hard and ugly right. Huckabee has built himself a nice little media empire. Gingrich may think that is what he is doing too, but he is so blowing his credibility that it may not materialize in the fashion he thinks it will.
But the biggest problem is he may give Obama a second term in the effort. We CANNOT let that happen.
The best place to start is to steal an issue from Gingrich. He prominently featured a discussion of the Obama adminsitration’s recent move against faith-based health care providers. The Catholic Church is coming out on this in the strongest possible terms. Mitt Romney needs to get in front of this as fast as he can. Where Gingrich appears to be religiously divisive, we need to build bridges, and hurl rocks at Gingrich to make sure we can build faster than he can destroy.
Posted in Religious Bigotry, Religious Freedom | 4 Comments » | 
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dduval on 31 Jan 2012 at 11:53 pm #
http://evangelicalsformitt.org/?s=chuck+colson
Great comments from Chuck Colson re: why Mormonism should not determining factor.
Also, I drove past 2 very evangelical churches today in Jacksonville Fl with Lots of Romney signs standing on their property! Very encouraging.
coltakashi on 01 Feb 2012 at 3:33 am #
The most outrageous anti-Mormon articles in the last week, intended to undermine Romney and prevent him from going up against Obama in the Fall, have come from the Left. The paranoia about an alleged Mormon conspiracy to carry out a takeover of the Federal government is really insane, and full of scenarios that any intelligent person who thought about it would be impossible in the real world. The secularists on the Left claim to have a prior claim on rationality, while religious believers don’t use their brains to think, but the notion that the Mormons think they could impose a theocracy on America is totally unhinged, let alone directly contrary to fundamental Mormon doctrines of support for religious freedom and for the US Constitution as an inspired document necessary to protect those freedoms with which the Creator has endowed us. The fact the Left believes that readers are too lazy to go check out the actual Mormons through mormon.org or lds.org says what they actually think is the true intelligence level of their audience. I see this continuing until Romney has the nomination secured.
But I think it will become moderated in the genetal election contest because at that point President Obama will be held responsible for attacks on not just Romney but also six million Americans, including Harry Reid and any Democratic leaning Mormons across the country. If Obama fails to explicitly denounce and renounce the anti-Mormon attack dogs, he will be viewed by many of his natural constituency, especially among more moderate to progressive independents, as pandering to the same lunatic fringe as the Obama “birthers” and the 9/11 “truthers”. So he will have to explicitly disavow and criticize that rhetoric, which will moderate it below the current level, where it is perceived as part of the primary negative campaign, but not something Obama has any connection with.
Failure by Obama to disavow and renounce the anti-Mormon element of the Left will provoke Mormons among his party to criticize him, realizing that their own respect among their fellow Mormons and chance for elective office will be terminated by a Democratic Party that becomes explicitly anti-Mormon. That includes Senator Reid, his son who has run for governor in Nevada, Representative Matheson of Utah, Bureau of Indian Affairs Administrator Larry Echohawk, who once had a shot at the governorship in Idaho, Democrat Mormons in state legislatures, and the Democratic Party leadership in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona.
JLF9999 on 01 Feb 2012 at 7:39 am #
I can understand why the left is terrified of having Godly people leading our nation. We don’t now have a president who is an active member of any church and so I have to wonder if prayer is an important part of his life. Maybe that is why the left supports him. Certainly Obama’s leftist leanings make it permissable or even preferable that he not be be a practicing church member. So when Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum or maybe even Newt Gingrich have a real chance to unseat Obama, the left goes nuts. Taking liberties with the truth here for a momment, I wonder if it is not like Holy Water being sprinkled on a demon.
What To And What Not To Worry About | Martha Zoller on 06 Feb 2012 at 7:22 am #
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