Why is Mitt Romney so unloved by the Republican base?
Even after Rick Perry's meteoric rise and fall in the polls, the main beneficiary of the Texas governor's stumbles has been Herman Cain, not Romney.
In a series of polls over the last few days, Cain, a man who has never held elective office, a virtually unknown person in the national political scene until his appearance on the multiple debate stages, has surged.
In the latest CBS News poll, Cain actually ties with Romney, 17% to 17%, even as Rick Perry falls from 23% to 12% compared to the same poll 2 weeks earlier.
So where's the love for Mitt, the presumptive GOP frontrunner? Shouldn't the GOP's vaunted "coronation" process, where the perceived best candidate is pushed forward by the establishment and base of the party towards the nomination, much like George W. Bush was in 2000, be creating a similar momentum for Romney?
The conventional answer goes something like this: Romney has changed so many of his core positions after his governorship of Massachusetts, and his subsequent multiple runs for president, that voters are suspicious of what he really believes.
Is Romney pro-choice? He was, but not anymore. Did he support the end of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military? Yes, that is, until he was against it. Gun laws, same. Immigration reform, he was for it until he discovered that you can't be nominated in today's post-Reagan GOP unless you advocate ever harsher anti-immigrant measures that, as in the case of Arizona and Alabama, amount to lightly disguised ethnic cleansing strategies.
And Social Security? When Perry first zoomed up the GOP preference polls -- and his nonstrategic insistence that the federal program that nearly wiped out poverty among senior citizens over the last 7 decades is nothing more than a gigantic Bernie Madoff-style scam -- Romney abandoned his Social Security privatization views for the more Florida-friendly new role as the Social Security champion.
While an evolution of your views over time is a sign of a learning brain, incorporating new facts as they are discovered, Romney's whole-cloth shift in so many fundamental issues of deep ideological import to Republicans is inherently suspect.
But this may not be Romney's biggest problem in creating an emotional bond with the base of the GOP. While the former Massachusetts Governor has morphed into a Southern-strategy friendly Conservative, he can't fully escape who he is. There are some factors that are beyond the power of focus-group driven repositioning.
Romney, of course, is a devout Mormon. His family is steeped in the Mormon tradition. And no one has remotely questioned Romney's sincerity in this regard. And that is the problem.
Romney is the Mormon in the room. His religion crashes directly into Evangelical Christian dogma. As CNN reported, Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, who has endorsed Rick Perry, has called the Mormon church a "cult."
In a recent speech before the conservative Values Voters Summit, Jeffress unloaded on the Mormon faith. Speaking to CNN after his appearance, Jeffress said, "I think Mitt Romney's a good, moral man, but I think those of us who are born-again followers of Christ should always prefer a competent Christian to a competent non-Christian like Mitt Romney. So that's why I'm enthusiastic about Rick Perry."
This is the ultimate dog whistle for Evangelicals. Jeffress is clearly making the case that Romney is a "non-Christian" and therefore not fit to be the President of the United States. In the same interview Jeffress asserted that Romney "doesn't embrace the historical tenets of evangelical Christianity."
And this is not a new problem from Romney. Back in 2007 during Romney's first run for the GOP nomination, the televangelist Bill Keller penned a missive to Evangelicals that is as clear as can be. It was titled "A vote for Romney is a vote for Satan."
Conservative firebrand and electoral marketing wiz Richard Viguerie published on his site in May an equally devastating claim:
55 percent of conservative activists and Tea Partiers polled by Richard Viguerie's ConservativeHQ.com responded that they, 'would vote for a third-party or independent candidate' if Romney were the nominee.
In simple terms, the most conservative Evangelical leaders are casting Romney as the "Other." Not as bad as a Kenyan Muslim to be sure, but in the same genre of unacceptable candidates.
Beyond the theological issues, the political implications of this line of thought are devastating for Romney. No Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan paid homage to the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1980 election, has made it to the White House without carrying the Evangelical vote by dominant margins.
The idea that in 21st century America a person can be disqualified for the presidency based on his religion is outrageous. Religious prejudice against Romney is as repulsive as the Tea Party's frequent flirtations with anti-Obama racism.
Romney by all accounts is a decent man. He should be given the chance to compete for the presidency on the merits of his ideas -- his religion is not a legitimate criteria to evaluate his fitness for the presidency.
And those who seek to create a theocratic test for presidential candidates should spend some time reading the U.S. Constitution. Article 6 clearly states:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
From the very beginning of our Republic, the Founders' worried about the kind of religious intolerance now being directed at Mitt Romney. As President George Washington wrote:
If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.
Robert Jeffress' anti-Mormon bigotry is exactly the kind of "spiritual tyranny" that George Washington warned us about. It has no place in American politics and GOP primary voters should reject it for what it is: un-American.
Follow Fernando Espuelas on Twitter: www.twitter.com/espuelasvox
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Why, Espuelas is showing deep ignorance concerning the basic problem of "Christian identity" (I am deliberately phrasing this to parallel the related problem of "Jewish identity"). Who has the right to call himself 'Christian'?
For the first several centuries of Christianity, the problem was settled with baptismal creeds, which later became standardized by decree of Ecumenical Council: you had the right to call yourself "Christian" if you were baptized and confessed the Creed.
But this solution was not good enough for the Protestants. The Western Christian world was flooded by groups calling themselves 'Christian', yet which could not repeat any of the Creeds with a straight face.
Worse yet, the spirit of compromise growing out of Westphalia encouraged people to give even pagan or gnostic groups the benefit of the doubt, and call them 'Christian' just because they called themselves 'Christian'.
And this is exactly the effect the Mormons are counting on. They have been on a campaign to 'legitimize' themselves as just another Protestant Christian Church. Yet they have never given up their pagan beliefs.
So no, it is not 'bigotry' to deny them the title 'Christian'. It is honesty. Apparently it is a kind of honesty that Espuelas is incapable of either practicing himself or tolerating in others.
Mormon officials in three states conspired to abduct and conceal my kids in a series of remote Mormon enclaves in order to immerse them in a completely Mormon environment, despite an order for joint custody.
Oregon's landmark 2005 kidnapping law is named "Aaron's Law" after my late son Aaron Cruz, who died in Payson, Utah. Aarons Law (Senate Bill 1041) is designed to remedy several common failures of the criminal and family law systems in preventing and resolving cases of child abduction.
Aarons Law provides abduction victims tools to hold their abductors, and those who provide financial, planning or logistical support to the abduction accountable financially, including religious organizations that engage in shunning, like the Mormons.
Personally, I’m glad Romney’s in the race. The more people understand the ins and outs of Mormonism, the more will reject it. Bring it on, Mitt! You too, Mr. Huntsman.
Every candidate for public office has the right to believe whatever he or she believes, to belong or not belong to any religious organization.
But the public does have a legitimate right to know the specifics of those beliefs, and to vote accordingly.
There is far too much at stake in the election of a President to give candidates a pass on such a fundamental part of their character and how they view the world.
Religion should be a private matter not some moral hucksters version of a dog and pony show to harness a congregation and prayer money for a political campaign. If people want to be lead religiously they should go to church. When you're looking to lead a secular community use the law as your guide.
Romney isn't disliked because he's a Mormon. More to the point he as well as the rest of the political pack are disliked because they are pretending to be somone they are not...a common, middle class American. They cannot relate and they and the media have America convinced that an ordinary citizen vs. a career politician cannot make good decisions for the electorate.
Romney will lose.
I have one thing in common with Southern christian bigots: I'd never vote for a mormon. Not in a million years. I do hope Romney's the Republican nominee.
Regardless of my current spiritual beliefs, I do believe LDS members to be Christians. They follow Jesus's tenets and have him as the center of their religion. After all you can not name your church "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" without having Jesus as your cornerstone.
Anyways, just thought you should know. :o)
What he did NOT do was "rewrite" the Bible. Rather, he copied it. For example, we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls that the King James Version of the Sermon on the Mount includes a number of changes from earlier texts. When Smith wrote out a Sermon on the Mount for the Book of Mormon he included the mistakes that were present in the King James Version, but none of the materials that the KJV omitted. If he had actually been inspired, the Smith version would have been closer to the Dead Sea Scrolls version.
But on the other, I believe that if most Americans understood what Mormons believe, they would find aspects outlandish at least: Is the Garden of Eden located in Missouri? Are Native Americans descendents of Israel's lost tribes? Did Jesus come to North America and preach to Native Americans? Did Joseph Smith dig up golden tablets in upstate New York that an angel named Moroni helped him decipher and then carried off to heaven? Does G-d live on a planet in outer space?
So far as I understand, the answer for a faithful Mormon to all these questions is 'yes.'
Do such beliefs disqualify its adherents from national office? No. But the more most Americans know about them, the more the they might be convinced that those who hold them are well away from the mainstream of American thought.
I'm an atheist myself, so how to rank various forms of what to me is philosophically untenable in all forms is beyond the scope of my knowledge or interests.