Mitt’s Muffled Soul
By FRANK BRUNI
LAST week he did it again, wading into a discussion of money — or, rather, of the “very poor” who lack it — and succumbing to yet another pink slip of the tongue. Mitt Romney is forever being tripped up this election cycle by the topic of wealth.
Not, interestingly, religion. That was the angst last time around, and the extent to which the dynamic has changed, with mammon supplanting Mormon as the bejeweled albatross around his neck, was reflected in another recent comment of his, one that prompted less notice and was interpreted in a particular and highly revealing way.
At one of the debates just before the Florida primary, as he and Newt Gingrich jousted over the Latino vote, he answered Gingrich’s charges that he was anti-immigrant by calling them “repulsive” and declaiming, “My father was born in Mexico.” Many news reports mentioned the moment, casting it as an example of his newfound readiness to take the fight back to Gingrich.
But only a few of those reports recognized what an odd line of defense Romney had employed, given why his father was born there. The family lived south of the border becauseMiles Park Romney, Mitt’s great-grandfather, had fled the United States after the passage of an 1882 law that explicitly banned polygamy, which he practiced. He was reputedly instructed to till a polygamous Mormon colony on foreign soil.
When Romney first ran for president in 2008, there was so much discussion about the potential impact of his Mormonism, and his own concern about it was deep enough, that he delivered a set-piece speech designed to rebut any lingering impression of the religion as an exotic, even loopy sect. In that painstakingly calibrated address, he said the word Mormon all of once. Christ or Christianity came up repeatedly.
Four years later, he still avoids the word, trumpeting his faithfulness without specifying the faith. What’s surprising is that no one around him — not reporters, not rivals — talks about it all that much, either. The Romney-Gingrich showdowns in South Carolina and Florida got plenty nasty: at one point the Gingrich camp, flashing back to Romney’s term as Massachusetts governor, falsely accused him of pretty much wresting kosher food from the mouths of Holocaust survivors. But neither Gingrich nor his allies played the Mormon card, even though nearly 20 percent of the Republicans and independents surveyed by Gallup last year said they wouldn’t support a Mormon presidential candidate.
Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said there was a simple, good reason to let Romney’s Mormonism be.
“It’s baked into the cake,” he said, explaining that at this point, voters are well aware of it, have already decided if it matters to them, and that’s that. Anyone trying to use it against Romney, even obliquely, might succeed only in being branded a religious bigot, especially in a country “that becomes more tolerant of difference all the time,” Schmidt said.
His assessment is borne out by what happened when Politico, in a report last August, said that President Obama’s tacticians were contemplating a general-election strategy that would underscore ways in which Romney seemed “weird.” The adjective sounded suspiciously like a stand-in for Mormon, as Romney’s enraged lieutenants noted, and the White House hastily denounced the Politico report as dead wrong. Two months later, a prominent Baptist pastor at the Values Voter Summit in Washington called Mormonism a cult and encountered an instant — and warranted — backlash.
Will that be the end of it? One longtime Republican strategist I talked with predicted that Gingrich would broach Romney’s Mormonism yet, with the aim of mobilizing the Mormon-wary evangelicals who vote in southern primaries on March 6, “Super Tuesday.”
That’s a regrettable motive. But there are valid reasons for the rest of us to home in on Romney’s religion, not in terms of its historical eccentricities but in terms of its cultural, psychological and emotional imprint on him.
His aloofness, guardedness and sporadic defensiveness: are these entwined with the experience of belonging to a minority tribe that has often been maligned and has operated in secret? Do his stamina and resilience as a candidate reflect his years of Mormon missionary work in France, during which he learned not to be daunted in the face of so much resistance that he won a mere 10 to 20 converts, according to “The Real Romney,” a biography published last month?
And what of his sometimes huffy expectation that voters accept his current stances against abortion and gun control, to name two flips, and stop fussing over so many contrary positions in the past? Does that track with Mormonism’s blithe reluctance, according to its critics, to explain controversial tenets that it has jettisoned, like a ban on black clergy members that was in place until 1978?
A tactful desire to avoid any sensationalizing of Romney’s faith has created a tendency not to give it appropriate due. To read “The Real Romney,” which represents an exception, is to realize the utter centrality of religion in his life. One of the book’s most arresting passages describes a moment when Ann, his wife-to-be and then a Protestant, asks him what Mormons believe. His detailed explanation moves her to tears, perhaps because it’s so heartfelt, perhaps also because he’s so nervous about her reaction.
The news media’s caution about focusing on Romney’s religion mirrors his own reticence, which, as Frank Rich pointed out in New York magazine last week, may be a big reason he can’t connect with voters in a visceral, intimate way. He’s editing out the core of his identity. He’s muffling his soul.
“His church experience is, I think, one of the great humanizing influences in Mitt Romney’s life,” said Patrick Mason, a professor of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University. Mason noted that if Romney would embrace that side of himself, he could beat the rap that he’s never been exposed to hardship by recounting his missionary experience. “That’s usually a very spartan lifestyle, and by definition most of the people you’re talking to are going to be poor.”
Romney’s even longer period as a Mormon lay leader in Boston involved counseling and consoling people dealing with marriage problems, addiction, unemployment: some of life’s messiest, scariest stuff. He must have gained a fluency in human frailty. But when The Times’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg was researching an article about that time, Romney predictably declined her interview request.
He has released tax returns, putting his Swiss accounts in the foreground. But he still cloaks his church duties, consigning his French proselytizing to the background.
Is it the right political calculation? I’m not sure. But I know it makes for a woefully incomplete portrait, denying voters something that they deserve — and that might well cut his way.
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