This much we know: Voters in New Hampshire and Iowa have received anti-Mormon calls targeting Mitt Romney.
The mystery is the source of the calls. Theories abound, as libs revel in the Republican "infighting" and enjoy putting the spotlight on the religion issue.
Sam Stein writes:
Even with evidence suggesting that, in a bit of political schadenfreude, Romney's people may have undertaken the endeavor - in hopes of casting his Mormonism in a sympathetic light - focus has shifted to the other GOP candidates.
One name increasingly thrown around among Republican insiders is the guy nipping at Romney's heels in the Iowa polls: former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
"Who has the most to gain by this," one operative told the Huffington Post. "It's Huckabee. If Romney were to fall he would be the conservative option to Rudy Giuliani."
A source with another Republican presidential campaign added fuel to the fire by pointing out that the Huckabee's statement on the matter - "The Huckabee campaign does not condone this type of activity" - isn't exactly an "outright" denial.
"Of course it is a denial," Huckabee's spokesperson, Alice Stewart, told the Huffington Post. Moreover, it's worth noting that few if any political connections have surfaced linking the former governor and Western Wats, the company that made the calls.
Other candidates have been equally adamant in insisting their non-involvement. Romney's campaign, for its part, has come out forcefully against speculation that the Mormon candidate could behind the anti-Mormon calls.
"That's preposterous," Romney's spokesman, Kevin Madden, told The Politico. "Emphatically, I reject any insinuation that we would support phone calls attacking our own campaign," he added to the Salt Lake Tribune.
Why is it assumed that the calls came from a Republican candidate's campaign?
One of the Dems' campaigns could be behind them.
And another thing, why aren't the attacks on Romney's faith being referred to as "swift boating"?
Don't orchestrated attacks on a candidate's religion merit such recognition?
(I wonder if a new term for smearing and dirty politics will come out of the '08 election -- "Mormoning.")
I think the emphasis being placed on Romney's faith is rather regressive. It's as if it's 1960 and JFK must reassure the American public that he is capable of being both Catholic and President of the United States.
It's a time warp. It's just weird to hear people say they wouldn't vote for Romney because he's a Mormon.
While I think it's legitimate to examine a candidate's character and values, taking the candidate's faith life into account, there's something very different about the way critics are discussing Romney's Mormonism.
For example, opponents attack Catholic candidates who claim to be practicing members of the Church while they ignore Church teaching.
Much has been said about Catholic Rudy Giuliani's positions on abortion and gay marriage, not to mention his less than perfect personal life -- infidelity and his string of marriages.
Giuliani is criticized by some for not being the best Catholic; but lapsed Catholic Giuliani is under fire, not his religion.
In Romney's case, he gets attacked for BEING a Mormon.
Unlike Giuliani, Romney is not attacked for being an imperfect follower of his faith. No one seems to be complaining that Romney is a bad Mormon. He's under fire simply for being a Mormon.
That difference is what I find to be troubling.
There's a significant difference between judging an individual for failing to faithfully practice one's professed religion and judging an entire religion to be unacceptable.
I don't have a problem with discussing the candidates and the importance of religion in their lives. That's a matter of character. What I have a problem with is religious intolerance.
With Giuliani, his status as a practicing Catholic is being made an issue without smearing the Catholic Church and its one billion followers.
With Romney, rather than questioning his personal standing as a Mormon, people are slamming Mormonism itself.
When the emphasis shifts from judgments about a particular candidate to judgments about a specific religion, that's were it crosses the line. It becomes a matter of religious bigotry.
In a rather odd column, Richard Cohen addresses religion in presidential politics and sort of defends Mitt Romney. As he offers support for Romney, he goes after Mike Huckabee's beliefs. He also gets some shots in at George W. Bush.
To the many people, both domestic and foreign, who are asking Mitt Romney to do as John F. Kennedy once did and make a speech explaining why his religion is not a threat to our cherished American way of life, I suggest that Romney respond by pointing to his Republican opponents and uttering two words: "You first."
Romney, of course, is Mormon while JFK was Catholic, but if the question is whether a candidate's religion should be of concern to the American people, the candidates who should respond are those who repeatedly assert that faith, not ideology, is what drives them and even leads them to question evolution. Such a candidate is Mike Huckabee, the affable former governor of Arkansas and, more to the point, an ordained Baptist minister. He raised his hand in the negative last May when all the GOP presidential candidates were asked whether they believed in the theory of evolution.
In doing so, Huckabee failed a religious test for the presidency established inadvertently by George W. Bush. Back before Bush, it was considered narrow-minded and, worst of all, elitist, to judge a person by the intensity of his religious convictions. Belief was not supposed to matter, and so it was impermissible to conclude anything about a person even if he thought Darwin was wrong or, more recently, that homosexuals chose their sexual orientation, presumably just to irritate the Christian right. Religion was irrelevant. Everyone said so -- and I agreed.
Bush changed that. He infused government with religion, everything from ineffective programs that promote sexual abstinence to an adamant refusal to authorize federal spending for most embryonic stem-cell research. The administration even erected barriers to the marketing of the Plan B morning-after pill. All these measures ran up against obstacles that were essentially religious, not strictly scientific, in nature.
Even the war in Iraq had an undeniably religious cast to it. It's not just that Bush told Bob Woodward that it was not his own father -- George H.W. Bush -- to whom he looked for strength, but "a higher father," it's also that the president consistently puts himself on the side of God in matters distinctly secular, such as his crusade for democracy. "I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom," the president has said. Maybe so, maybe not, but that's not a sound basis for a foreign policy.
Now we have Huckabee talking in a similar manner. A fair reading of the Huckabee literature -- his Web site, interviews, etc. -- shows a similar religious inclination, and while on "The Charlie Rose Show" or something similar he can have moments of secular lucidity, his Web site forthrightly declares that he does not distinguish between his faith and his politics. "I don't separate my faith from my personal and professional lives," he says.
But a president should do exactly that.
...If anything, Romney is the anti-Huckabee. There is not the slightest hint that his religion has constrained his politics in any way. You name the issue and he's been for it and against it -- gun control, abortion, gay rights. Call this what you may, it is proof that Romney is not enslaved by any dogma. His religion, to which he is committed, is distinctly his business and would not, as far I can tell, have any bearing on his presidency.
It's ridiculous for Cohen to suggest that Bush was the president who brought religion into politics and policy, as if other presidents didn't infuse government with religion.
I don't think Cohen intended to defend Romney. He takes swipes at Romney as a flip flopper.
I think Cohen set out to attack Huckabee. Cohen clearly sees Huckabee as an emerging force. He seems to be afraid that the Christian Right might embrace candidate Huckabee, so he attacks.
I don't think Cohen wants to divide Republicans. He believes that inciting religious bigotry is an effective method.
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