Posts Tagged ‘david bernstein’

Romney refuses to acknowledge that his church was wrong to exclude blacks; instead, Romney offers his father’s march with MLK as proof of his progressive values, yet there is no evidence that Romney’s father ever marched with MLK

December 19, 2007 in 2008, campaign communications, campaign communiques, campaign literature, conservatism, election 2008, GOP, incompetence, Iowa, media, mitt romney, republicans, romney, stupidity, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
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“I’ve been on the road for a couple of days, but I want to circle back to Mitt Romney’s appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday to make two points,” writes Tom Bevan in a realclearpolitics article titled Romney’s MTP Turn

First, I think Romney made a significant mistake by refusing to acknowledge that his church was wrong to discriminate against blacks up until 1978. This should have been a no-brainer, and his refusal to state the obvious was made even more pronounced by citing his father’s record of marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, his mother’s civil rights record, etc. – all of which was a tacit admission that the church’s policy of discrimination was wrong. So why not just say so? … etc.

Did Romney’s father march with Dr. Martin Luther King?—well, opinions differ.

“In the most-watched speech of his political career, speaking on ‘Faith in America’ at College Station, Texas, earlier this month, Mitt Romney evoked the strongest of all symbolic claims to civil-rights credentials: ‘I saw my father march with Martin Luther King,'” writes the estimable David Bernstein in a Phoenix exclusive titled Was it all a dream? EXCLUSIVE: Mitt Romney claims that his father marched with MLK, but the record says otherwise

He has repeated the claim several times recently, most prominently to Tim Russert on Meet the Press . But, while the late George W. Romney, a four-term governor of Michigan, can lay claim to a strong record on civil rights, the Phoenix can find no evidence that the senior Romney actually marched with King, nor anything in the public record suggesting that he ever claimed to do so.

Nor did Mitt Romney ever previously claim that this took place, until long after his father passed away in 1995 — not even when defending accusations of the Mormon church’s discriminatory past during his 1994 Senate campaign.

Asked about the specifics of George Romney’s march with MLK, Mitt Romney’s campaign told the Phoenix that it took place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. That jibes with the description proffered by David S. Broder in a Washington Post column written days after Mitt’s College Station speech.

Broder, in that column, references a 1967 book he co-authored on the Republican Party, which included a chapter on George Romney. It includes a one-line statement that the senior Romney “has marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit.”

But that account is incorrect. King never marched in Grosse Pointe, according to the Grosse Pointe Historical Society, and had not appeared in the town at all at the time the Broder book was published. “I’m quite certain of that,” says Suzy Berschback, curator of the Grosse Pointe Historical Society. (Border was not immediately available for comment.) …

… King had already left the state, and Romney did not participate in the Grosse Pointe walk, according to records from the time.

George Romney would later lead a 10,000-person march through Detroit, but not with King.

Although Broder’s book contained the brief mention, there is nothing in the public record to suggest that George Romney himself ever claimed to have marched with King.

Had George Romney ever marched with Martin Luther King Jr., it almost certainly would have been documented. From the mid-’50s through 1962, Romney was one of the country’s most prominent business leaders — for him to travel South for a civil-rights march would have been remarkable. From January 1963 on, as governor of Michigan and a presumed Presidential candidate, Romney was one of the most visible political figures in the country … etc.

yours &c.
dr. g.d.

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Romney’s absurd marketing strategy enables Gov. Mike Huckabee

December 13, 2007 in 2008, analysis, argument, campaign communications, campaign communiques, campaign literature, campaign management, conservatism, election 2008, Evangelicals, GOP, incompetence, Iowa, media, mitt romney, policy, republicans, rhetoric, romney, strategy, stupidity, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
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“WASHINGTON – Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee appears to be using Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith as a wedge issue to attract evangelical voters in the early states, political scientists say, a move that in part seems to be helping Huckabee stay ahead in Iowa polls,” writes Thomas Burr for the Salt Lake Tribune in an article titled Huckabee winning support by highlighting Romney’s Mormonism

Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, aired a TV commercial in Iowa recently telling voters he is a “Christian leader,” a move that could be seen as a veiled hit on Romney, whose faith is viewed as heretical by some Protestant evangelicals. And Huckabee has so far refused to say whether he believes the LDS Church is a cult, as his Southern Baptist religion labels the church.

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Huckabee goes even further when asked if he believes Mormons are cultists. While first saying he didn’t know much about Mormonism, Huckabee then asks the reporter in an “innocent voice”: “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”

Some political observers say Huckabee, now the leading GOP candidate in Iowa polls, is raising the issues of Romney’s faith as a campaign tactic …

Gov. Huckabee’s line of reasoning is blowback, Romney’s blowback: a hard and furious negation in the form of a necessary complement to Romney’s line of reasoning. Shall we clarify our claim? Indeed we shall. Follow us, step by step …

(1) Consider Bernstein’s account of Romney’s line as delivered in The Phoenix:

… Romney’s similar [to Gibson’s] marketing challenge emerged this past year, when he and his advisors made the strategic decision to campaign as the conservative alternative option to Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, the perceived front-runners for the Republican nomination. That strategy would require Romney to win large numbers of votes from religious conservatives. Unfortunately for him, Romney had a long, well-established record of moderate and even liberal stands on a number of issues, including abortion.

So, like Gibson, Romney began spreading word of the anti-Mormon plots against him long before anyone knew who he was, let alone what religion he practiced. By late 2006, he was sitting for interviews with almost anyone willing to write about the “Mormon question” — landing him on the cover of almost every conservative publication in the country.

Romney also mimics Gibson’s strategy by de-emphasizing his own religious beliefs, even while speaking of the importance of evangelicals’ beliefs. Gibson, while avidly recounting his own “born-again” religious awakening and its importance on the movie, rarely answered questions about his pre–Vatican II Catholic beliefs. Romney professes the importance of his faith in Jesus Christ, while saying that the rest of his Mormon beliefs are out-of-bounds …

(2) According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Gov. Huckabee’s line with respect to Romney is to

(a) Follow Romney’s own line of reasoning by emphasizing what Romney himself tried to de-emphasized—to draw out distinctions where Romney has tried to blur them. As Romney himself argues with respect to Gov. Huckabee, “[Huckabee]’s obviously appealing to people of his faith, and that’s something that clearly opens the door to that inquiry.”

So too Romney: Romney opened the door.

(b) Call Romney’s bluff by enacting Romney’s own persecution narrative—a Parker and Stone (creators of South Park) gesture where the speaker or writer inoculates himself or herself against a charge of e.g. insensitivity by behaving so outrageously insensitively that the behavior can only be interpreted as ironic and satirical. For example, Gov. Huckabee asking “in an innocent voice”: “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” Painfully literal whimperers like Michael Novak took Huckabee’s bait and preened themselves on their sensitivity and correctness, little realizing that they had been mercilessly spoofed in advance.

Put differently: Imagine getting angry at a South Park episode because of how Parker and Stone depict e.g. the differently abled—well, you, the viewer, getting outraged is precisely the point because this is how Parker and Stone make their point!—and all the Michael Novaks in the world can fein righteous indignation little realizing that they have become a part of the joke, little realizing that the whimpering Novaks themselves are enacting the very point of the joke.

Our conclusion: as we argued elsewhere, Gov. Huckabee’s rise is an artifact of Romney’s own practices, policies, and lines of argument.

Romney campaign a victim of the “sunk cost effect”—also: how Gov. Huckabee’s sudden ascendancy is an artifact of the Romney campaign’s misguided activities

To be honest we always regarded Gov. Huckabee as a likable rube. Forced by rising poll numbers to take the former governor seriously, we have upgraded our assessment. The man is more subtle, attentive, and articulate than his rivals, especially Romney. Were he to win the nomination we would support him in the general election.

yours &c.
dr. g.d.

P.S. … to negate is to indicate an alternative, a neglected complement; it is to delineate a determination and to fix a definitive character.—Errol Harris.

Bernstein on Romney’s “speech”: “Whereas Kennedy asked Protestants to vote for him despite the bias against his faith, Romney, with a keen ear for the contemporary Christian right, asked them to vote for him because of that bias. No, Romney was not taking from JFK’s playbook — he was taking from Mel Gibson’s.”

December 13, 2007 in 2008, analysis, argument, campaign communications, campaign communiques, campaign literature, campaign management, conservatism, election, election 2008, Evangelicals, GOP, media, mitt romney, republicans, rhetoric, romney, strategy, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
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“Pity Mitt Romney, the object of religious persecution, forced to make a public speech confronting the antagonistic forces that have kept his candidacy down by attacking his faith,” writes David Bernstein in an article titled The passion of the candidate; Romney’s religion speech was aimed at Christian conservatives, but his model wasn’t JFK — it was Mel Gibson carried by The Phoenix

As many commentators opined this past week, it’s sad to realize that, almost 50 years after John F. Kennedy’s “Catholic speech,” our nation still hasn’t gotten beyond these biases.

Haven’t we? Actually, there is scant evidence that anti-Mormon bias has held back Romney, who until very recently led the polling in both of the critical early-voting states, Iowa and New Hampshire. Although polls show that, in the abstract, people are less likely to support a Mormon candidate than one of most other religions, those same polls — including one from Vanderbilt University released this past week — show that most of that resistance evaporates when respondents learn that Romney is Mormon.

In fact, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll taken just before Romney’s speech showed that his Mormonism makes nearly as many people more likely to vote for him as less.

What hurts Romney, according to that poll, are his changing positions on important issues. Asked which candidate says what he believes, rather than what people want to hear, Romney ranked last of the major GOP presidential candidates, by a wide margin.

And yet the same media — and more important, the same evangelical Christians — who previously discarded Romney’s words as phony political calculation, greeted his “Mormon speech” as heartfelt and authentic.

“His speech was directed at mainstream evangelical churchgoers,” says David Woodard, a political-science professor at Clemson University. “They were reassured that they can vote for him as president.”

David Caton, founder of the Florida Family Association, called the speech “a grand slam.” Similar positive reactions came in from prominent Christian conservatives on the cable news networks immediately following the speech, and, according to Woodard, in churches the following Sunday.

How did Romney do it? By tapping into a deep-running sense of persecution among American evangelicals.

Whereas Kennedy asked Protestants to vote for him despite the bias against his faith, Romney, with a keen ear for the contemporary Christian right, asked them to vote for him because of that bias.

No, Romney was not taking from JFK’s playbook — he was taking from Mel Gibson’s.

Gibson turned his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ into a mega-blockbuster by convincing evangelical Christians that this was a movie that “they,” the secular New York and Hollywood anti-God elites, didn’t want you to see.

Romney now claims to be the candidate “they” don’t want you to vote for. If evangelicals rose to the bait for Gibson’s film, what’s to say they won’t similarly rally to Romney’s cause?

The parallels are striking. Gibson’s film grossed more than a half-billion dollars. Will the strategy work as well for Mitt as it did for Mel? …

… Romney’s similar [to Gibson’s] marketing challenge emerged this past year, when he and his advisors made the strategic decision to campaign as the conservative alternative option to Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, the perceived front-runners for the Republican nomination. That strategy would require Romney to win large numbers of votes from religious conservatives. Unfortunately for him, Romney had a long, well-established record of moderate and even liberal stands on a number of issues, including abortion.

So, like Gibson, Romney began spreading word of the anti-Mormon plots against him long before anyone knew who he was, let alone what religion he practiced. By late 2006, he was sitting for interviews with almost anyone willing to write about the “Mormon question” — landing him on the cover of almost every conservative publication in the country.

Romney also mimics Gibson’s strategy by de-emphasizing his own religious beliefs, even while speaking of the importance of evangelicals’ beliefs. Gibson, while avidly recounting his own “born-again” religious awakening and its importance on the movie, rarely answered questions about his pre–Vatican II Catholic beliefs. Romney professes the importance of his faith in Jesus Christ, while saying that the rest of his Mormon beliefs are out-of-bounds.

The secrecy is no surprise. Not only are both men’s beliefs heretical to the evangelicals they courted, but both the traditionalist Catholic and Mormon faiths consider those evangelicals to be apostates themselves. Hardly a match made in heaven, you would think … etc.

yours &c.
dr. g.d.