Lounging around my hotel room early this morning and watching the national news shows (something I rarely am able to do) I found several aspects of the reporting on the "money primary" fascinating from an Article VI Blog perspective.
Starting off the day, there was Matt Lauer on "Today," asking Romney if his money mostly came from Mormons. Presumably to give himself cover for an otherwise outrageous question, Lauer referred to a New York Times story this morning that baldly asserted Romney success resulted from "tapping two distant but rich networks — Wall Street and the Mormon Church — to easily outpace his better-known Republican primary rivals." The L.A. Daily News ran the same story with the astonishing headline, "Romney rakes in cash from Mormons."
Full disclosure: I am a Romney supporter and have donated to his campaign. That qualifies me, therefore, to note that the forms donors must complete do not require a statement of faith. So how do the Times and the Daily News headline writer know Romney's success depended on members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the "LDS Church")? Well, the article says, "[r]esidents of Utah, the center of the Mormon Church, contributed about 15 percent of the total contributions, more per capita than any other state."
There are too many angles here to comment on. I'll try a few:
1. It is remarkable, to say the least, that the news media go directly to Romney's faith when trying to explain anything about him. Mostly, I suppose, this is due to the relatively unknown nature of Mormonism (even though the LDS Church is the fourth-largest denomination in the USA now). The Church is still such a curiosity to so many people– including those sophisticates among the MSM elite. Hugh Hewitt has more on on this.
2. It would have been (a little) better if the Times story had referred to "two distant but rich networks — Wall Street and [members of] the Mormon Church." The Church gives no candidate money; only Church members do. Are there no editors at the Times?
3. In explaining LDS Church members' support for Romney, both Lauer and Hugh liken Church members to ethnic groups. Hugh notes that Mormons support their own man "just as a lot of Italian-Americans no doubt donated to Giuliani, African-Americans to Barack Obama, Jewish-Americans to Joe Lieberman, and Greek-Americans to Michael Dukakis." I think Hugh's got the right idea, but to me as a Mormon it feels strange to compare membership in my church to membership in an ethnic group, especially because the modern LDS Church is so multi-ethnic. (Just drop in on a Church Sunday meeting in Harlem, or East Los Angeles, or downtown Chicago sometime.) Church membership, after all, is self-selecting; ethnicity is not.
4. My prediction: After April 15, when all the data are in, the numbers will be sliced and diced every which-way. I will guarantee that there will be an effort to quantify Romney's Mormon support. There may be an effort to do the same with Obama's African-American support. Will reports on Romney's Mormon support have an undertone of conspiracy, of something not quite right, while Obama's African-American support is celebrated as a manifestation of American grass-roots politics? I think I know the answer, but I hope I am wrong.
John adds: Two brief comments on the piece, which, by the way, was reprinted by the LA Daily News under that particularly egregious headline. Firstly Lowell, I don't think you have to concern yourself about whether this coverage will have the inference and undertone of conspiracy - it's already there in this piece and related blog posts I have seen. Asking a question about a group that would not normally be asked about other groups implies conspiracy.
Secondly. this entire story is fabricated out of whole cloth. Their facts are minimal and add up to nothing. Basically they are threefold. One, the statistical giving out of Utah cited by Lowell above. So be it, it's natural. Bush got way more than his share of money out of Texas, McCain is no doubt bringing in huge bucks out of Arizona, and so it goes. Second fact, the entirely trumped up improper contact with BYU story from last fall. It was a mistake, a small one at that, and simply cannot be interpreted as rising to the level of a conspriacy. The third fact is the distribution of giving to Romney's PAC.
Now, PAC giving is NOT campaign giving. They are different things. A PAC is designed to serve certain specific causes, not candidates. When you couple this with the fact that campaign contributions are capped by law, you begin to see there is no there, there. All those rich and powerful Mormon names they cite can give no more to the campaign than Lowell can, or myself for that matter, though I have made no such contribution. This means in order for there to be an actual Mormon network at play, there would have to be some means of coordinating efforts. Where is the evidence of that?
It certainly is not happening within the confines of the LDS church, that would be a violation of church doctrine as Lowell has so ably pointed out time and again. Not to mention it would violate a bunch of campaign finance laws; a fact which I am fairly certain would have the Attorney General breathing down Romney's neck even as I write if there was anything to it.
This piece is journalism at its very worst. It is the implication of problem where none exists, which makes it not reporting, but activism. I thought journalists were supposed to be unbiased, that biased writing was up to us bloggers and to radio talk show hosts. To be frank, I was unsurprised when blog posts along these lines started to show up, but for it to show in the MSM, this fast, is really troubling. For it to happen this rapidly says the NYTimes had reporters poised to write the piece, with the background research done, needing only the figures to publish. In other words, they had their angle before they had their data - the very definition of agenda journalism.
And all at the expense of a religion I do not hold, but that nonetheless deserves a place at the American table. To work to deny it that place, through baseless implication, is nothing less than un-American.
Technorati Tags: Mormons, Mormonism, LDS Church, politics, New York Times, fund-raising, Romney, Matt Lauer, Hugh Hewitt
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