When Subtlety Left The Building (and Grace, and Good Humor, and Wit)
I am by academic training a scientist and vocationally I do a lot of engineering. That means that rhetorically I am inclined to be a blunt instrument. No, I think that is putting it too softly. By predilection, I am more like the guy in this wrestling video:
And yet, even I am struck at how naked and aggressive are the attacks now flowing Romney’s way from the left. Yesterday we dismissed Tim Egan’s NYTimes piece on Romney’s lack of vice as “silly.” And yet Martin Bashir found it so convincing he doubled down! Can anything besides naked aggression account for advancing something that the author at least partially had his tongue-in-his-cheek when he wrote and using it as serious attack?
And remember a couple of weeks ago when we dealt with Salon’s Alex Pareene’s defense of Lawrence O’Donnell as making a joke? Well, Mr. Pareene has new ebook out and Salon has an exceprt:
Mitt Romney is weird. When the Obama reelection campaign early in the cycle made the mistake of indicating that its strategy would be to imply that Mitt Romney is weird by repeatedly telling Politico that it planned on calling Mitt Romney weird, Romney’s camp countered by causing a brief and not particularly sincere media brouhaha over whether “weird” is code for “Mormon.” Plenty of Americans think Mormons are weird, yes, but in this case, the simple fact is Mitt Romney is weird, entirely apart from his religion.
And now the sledgehammer is a howitzer! Not to mention that opening by saying, “It’s not about religion,” is tantamount to an admission that it is about religion. Not because I agree with it, but because it is a lesson in how to message this kind of stuff, a link to this Atlantic piece is in order. “Romney’s ‘Leave it to Beaver’ in the ‘Gossip Girl’ age,” yada, yada, yada, but at least it manages to level the “weird” charge with some humor and style.
And then, because they are having a hard time getting the “Mormons are racist; therefore Romney is racist” thing to stick (Gee, I wonder why? Maybe a lack of reality?) some guy at HuffPo decides to “prove” Mormons have an Indian problem. The quoting of sacred texts of any faith and using it for “gotcha” is old, tired and pointless. The Bible says God created the Earth in six days and yet I am NOT a young earth creationist. Go figure.
Concerning the weekend dust-up at Liberty University. When Liberty took down the Facebook announcement, the griping went away. What is amazing is that CNN’s follow-up piece on that does not charge censorship. What do we learn? Mostly that CNN is lazy trying to turn Facebook comments into a story. “You’re stupid” – “Nu-uh, you are” does not constitute debate.
One other mis-messaging comes in this interview with Ross Douthat on his new book which is in the pile but I have not gotten to yet. In a classic “theology first” approach Douthat proclaims both Romney and Obama as “heretics,” but then goes on to talk about how clearly preferable Romney is to people of faith. Once the label “heretic” is applied I think people might just stop listening. If one wants Romney to win, which I assume to be the case if he is preferable, then a much softer descriptor might be in order, or maybe bury the thought way down from the lede.
There was a great transcript of a Pew event on Mormons and Civic Life. It’s long and it’s smart and it is the first really serious thing we have linked to today (save of course the self referential links scattered throughout 
) Sadly few will read it through.
And finally. Michael Medved gets it right:
Before Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign, exit polls from his landslide victory in the Louisiana primary showed that a stunning 73% of Republican voters insisted that it “matters that a candidate shares my religious beliefs” — expressing the conviction that it’s appropriate to judge a prospective president based on his theological orientation. Only 12% took the position that it matters “not at all” if a candidate’s religious outlook differed from their own.
There’s an obvious irony to this situation: Many of those same social conservatives who claim to revere the plain text of the Constitution seem determined to ignore its prohibition on religious tests for federal office.
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Rockgod28 on 24 Apr 2012 at 8:12 am #
Team Obama is getting desparate as the media tries to define Mitt Romney. It isn’t working very well as you pointed out so clearly in your wonderful article.
My father was an engineer so your style of writing is great to me.
I am surprised how quickly Team Obama, especially Martin Bashir and Lawrence O’Donnell, went straight for Mitt Romney’s religion.
They attack it from both ends of the extreme. O’Donnell goes for the Mormon religion is a false religion and Bashir goes for Mormons are hypocrites for not following their religion and Mormons don’t stand a chance as they follow their religion to be President because they don’t drink beer like everyone else.
CNN is doing everything they can with their Round 2 article about Liberty University to play up the Evangelical/Mormon divide.
They failed. The only people commenting there now kicking up trouble are atheists attempting to follow through with their stated goals of ridiculing believers at their DC rally or people who don’t even go to Liberty University.
That means there is no story and there never was in the first place with less than one half of one percent making bigoted comments only to find they were not accurate in the first place since they comments on Facebook were not from actual students that were upset Mitt Romney was speaking at the university.
I am sure there will be more non-stories as the election gets closer and the panic of Barak Obama losing really sets in.
If the Team Obama attempts to define part of Mitt Romney’s weirdness as racist and he picks a VP like Rubio or West, then what is Team Obama going to do to win the election?
coltakashi on 24 Apr 2012 at 12:38 pm #
It is amazing how name sites like Salon exercise no editorial control over assertiona of inflammatory lies. One wonders if they would have let Joseph Goebbels attack Jews in this way. The claim that American Indians were denied priesthood ordination by Mormons is patently false. The claim that Indian children were taken into Mormon homes to work as servants is a defamation of hundreds of families who hosted Indian children during the school year so they could attend school with their own children. Those families fed and clothed the Indian students so they could obtain a better education than was available.in Reservation schools in the 1950-1970 time period. I went to school with several Indian students who came back each year. They were treated as members of the family. The indignation of the author wouldd be better directed at the Federal government which failed in its duty to provide education on the reservations.
Simple research could have pointed out these lies. Salon just doesn’t care about lies told about hundreds of good and caring people.
The restriction on ordination of men of African ancestry that ended in 1978 was an anomaly because NO restriction existed for American Indians, Polynesians, Asians, or any other race or nationality. Mormons were baptizing and ordaining Shoshone Indians when they first settled in Utah. They were baptizing and ordaining Mormons in Tahiti and Hawaii in the 1840s and 1850s. They were baptizing and ordaining Japanese and Mexicans in 1901. These are simple historical facts, but Salon publishes lies.