Newsweek Cover Story on Romney

I’d like to say a few things about the recent Newsweek article entitled: ‘A Mormon’s Journey: The Making of Mitt Romney’. The selection of Mitt Romney for a cover story at this time seems a bit odd in light of his placing fourth among the Republicans in most national poll’s, however he is leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire, hoping a strong performance there will give him the boast he needs to carry other states and get the nomination. At the outset I want to remind readers about two things: 1) I like Mitt Romney, I think he’s a good man, and 2) I am not however (at least currently, and probably never) supporting him for the Republican nomination (I’m a Giuliani man right now), despite my being an active Mormon and sometimes Republican.

A major aspect of the story (written by Jonathan Darman and Lisa Miller) regards what role Mitt’s Mormonism is to play in the framing of the campaign. Mormonism is of course an issue with the party’s evangelical base, many of whom regard the LDS faith as heretical or even a cult. However Mormonism still occupies a place of suspicion in the broader American mind set, due to its history, doctrines, and a widely held perception, that there’s something just not quite right going on underneath the faith’s clean-cut image. This is frustrating in that we’ve kind of gone through this ‘alien faith’ thing before already, nearly fifty years ago with John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism. Regardless of theological differences with its denominational peers, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s is the 4th biggest church in this country, and its members very much part of the fabric of American life, not to different from their neighbors, and a long way of from the ‘threat to civil society’ their forbears were widely perceived to be in the 19th century. Mitt Romney’s not Warren Jeff’s or Brigham Young, he’s a blueblood establishment businessman whose done some position flopping, and that’s were the criticism and analysis would be most relevantly directed by the public and media.

That being said I still must express a certain fascination with the only tangentially important father son dynamic going on with Mitt and the late George Romney. Now Mitt’s father’s a man I’d have been happy to vote for. He switched his opinion on the Vietnam War when he encountered the facts on the ground, it was a principled not expedient change, and he was eviscerated for it in the media. He was a believing Mormon, very pious in many ways, yet he was not prone to impose his religious values on others, stocking alcohol in his house for non-member visitors, and insisting that an Italian exchange student who stayed with the family attend meetings of his Catholic faith on Sundays. I like Mitt Romney, but I really like George Romney.

Anyway as the article states, George’s telling it as he saw it approach, and how it subsequently hurt him politically, may have been a major factor in his son’s development of a hyper-conscious phraseology and presentation in his rhetoric and campaigning. Here we have a mirror with the Bush’s, son’s not wanting to repeat father’s political mistakes, and in both cases sacrificing some of their parents principled practicality in exchange for a certain base courting shallowness. I really don’t think we as a country want to go through that again just now.