Mitt and His Magic Moment

I wanted to write something witty and clever about Mitt's so-called "Kennedy Moment." However, since I lack cleverness or wit, I'll defer to the great Charles Pierce, who crystallizes my thoughts exactly:

Hey, Mitt. They think your religion is a cult and they think you're pretty much a foof. They're always going to think that, even when and if you're the nominee and some of them beg their Personal Lord And Strength Coach for permission to vote for you. Ain't going to be pretty, son. I feel for my former governor. I truly do. He's taking an unfair rap for his religion, and an unfair rap for his gardeners, all in the same week. However -- and it is a big However -- he's the one who decided to run for the nomination of a party that has enthralled itself to shoeless fundamentalist rubes and anti-immigration yahoos. He could have gone two ways. He could have stood against this and argued, correctly, that the GOP is on its way to becoming a regional, racialist-based, minority party. (The approach John McCain briefly tried on in the aftermath of the 2000 South Carolina primary, but which he thereupon abandoned for the next seven years.) He could have done us all a favor and Souljah'ed the lunatic portions of his base. He had the money and the record to do it. Instead, he pandered, over and over again, to the crazy people, and now the crazy people are acting like crazy people act, and all the chickens are coming home to roost on his handsomely chiseled head.

Further, the endless fake parallels to John F. Kennedy's speech to the Baptist ministers are as ahistorical as they are clumsily drawn. Kennedy was addressing a still-extant cultural anti-Catholicism in the South and nativist Know-Nothingism in the North that had remained virulent within his lifetime. He was addressing his speech to the entire country and, if you read it very carefully, you discover that he essentially was telling the Baptist ministers to go to hell, that they were crackpot religious bigots whom he very subtly marginalized from a changing political process. Most of what he told them they didn't really believe, and he knew it, and they knew it. Kennedy wasn't appealing for their support. He was warning them that their stale religious prejudices were being left behind in the New Frontier. As is plain from the text to everyone except, apparently, David Brooks, Romney's speech was narrowly aimed at garnering the support of an important slice of the base he needs to win his party's nomination. The deliberate misreading of the Constitution. The Meacham-esque blathering about the religiosity of the Founders. The monumentally indiscreet -- and philosophically risible -- equation of freedom with public god-babbling. This is all nothing except more pandering. And shouldn't someone making this facile comparison point out that Romney is a Mormon bishop and is thus tied more closely to his church's power structure than Kennedy ever was? I mean, Jack wasn't even a very good Catholic. Gene McCarthy was right about that.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. That Mitt would say there should be no religious test, then would basically turn around and say that there should be a religious test and that he passes! is basically what I expected. This parallels the immigration debate, where Bush was hoping that he could bring the more socially conservative Hispanic vote to the Republican party and add to his base, forgetting that the odious Republican base doesn't like people who don't shimmer with lily whiteness, which, of course, is how the Republicans wanted it. They built their base, in large part, on racial and religious bigotry, and they still want to use it when it's convenient (like when there are Muslims afoot). Maybe this nonsense still speaks to them enough for Mitt the Duplicitous to win the primary (I doubt it, but what do I know? Little). But the coalition of pricks has been showing signs of fraying lately.