The Holy Cow! Candidate - © Copyright 2005 The Atlantic Monthly
Which doesn’t mean, of course, that Romney is incapable of being politically coy when it suits him. Though he hasn’t publicly announced any decisions yet, he clearly does have one eye fixed on bigger things. In Spartanburg, South Carolina, speaking before a packed room in late February, he railed against gay marriage and the creation of embryos for use in stem-cell research. Many of South Carolina’s most important party leaders and power brokers showed up to watch him.Romney has kept up his travels to key 2008 primary states, and has been doing political fundraising nationwide. Meanwhile, some of his friends have created a collection of political-action committees, dubbed the Commonwealth PACs. These were started, as his close friend and former business colleague Bob White told me, “to help Republicans primarily at the state level around the country.” Last year the PACs contributed $76,000 to local Republicans in Iowa, site of the momentum-generating first caucus.
But all this will be for naught if Romney can’t answer one of the biggest questions that would dog his candidacy. As it happens, it’s a question that had slipped my mind as I was discussing the prospect of a national Romney candidacy with Ted Kennedy on the phone one Saturday afternoon. (Once Romney’s nemesis and conqueror, Kennedy now speaks respectfully of him, as does Boston’s Democratic mayor, Tom Menino; both Kennedy and Menino have collaborated with Romney on various projects. Romney and Senator John Kerry, on the other hand, seem to want nothing to do with each other.) I was winding down our conversation when Senator Kennedy interrupted me. “The one question you didn’t ask,” he said, “was about Mormonism—whether it would hurt him in a national campaign.”
“I was about to,” I said.
“The answer is no,” Kennedy said. “We’ve moved on. That died with my brother Jack.”
Romney himself says he serves the people, not the Book of Mormon. But though the matter should have died with the election of Jack Kennedy (who himself spoke on religious freedom at the Mormon Tabernacle in 1960), Romney’s religion remains—as a prominent Republican strategist who worked on both George W. Bush campaigns told me—”the other M.”
July 30th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
I read the article, Gurl, and I agree that it is very good. Questions like those about the garments WILL be asked, and geting them out of the way early, and in a manner which flatters the Governor, are a bonus.
I honestly think that the punditocracy is overestimating the hostility of evangelicals to Mormons. What they want is a moral PERSON, and Romney is that.
Don’t forget, Gore was the Baptist, and Bush is a Methodist. The person is bigger than the denomination.