Romney and Religion

Today we lost the best chance America had to get back on track.
Mitt Romney is a great man with the high moral character, positive vision,
knowledge and skills this country desperately needed.
I wish him and his family the best, though they already have it.

Today we lost one of the best chances America had to get back on track.
Mitt Romney is a great man, with high moral values, a positive vision for our future,
and the skills and knowledge needed to restore confidence in our government leaders.
I wish him and his family the best, though they already have the best.

I respected Romney. I think his change on abortion did not mean he was just trying to win. I believed you can have strong inner values about issues and think it is not your right to expect others to share your own beliefs. To come to a realization that what you once thought could be the wrong choice, doesn't seem so weird to me. I have changed in my life. I think his actions in his life showed his true character.

Zigzig, thanks for proving my point: it's the willingness of people like you to draw on the stereotypes they've been taught that caused the narrative of Mitt's inauthenticity.

I find It very hard to believe that someone can "put on a family oriented face" contribute to society and have a spotless background for their entire life, yet have a secret attempt to "win the world to Satanism." Look at what your saying -- be reasonable. Having a brilliant, hard working man of integrity in the White House would have been a great contribution to our country. I lived in Arizona for ten years and in no way was I impressed with Sen. McCains contribution to Arizona. Illegal immigration was (is) rampant. No one does anything about it. He was the Senator and not one thing was done. What makes anyone think something would be done as the leader of our country.

One of the ways that religious, racial, and sexual bigotry work is by creating and employing stereotypes. The stereotypes attached to blacks and women are well known and, for that reason, somewhat disarmed. Among most people, the stereotype of Mormons is squeaky-clean, to the point of being comic. But among evangelicals, there is a readily accessible body of literature that characterizes the Mormon church as a cult, a sinister, diabolical, and secret society that puts on a kindly, Christian, family-oriented face, but is secretly attempting to win the world to Satanism. And Mormon individuals are either dupes of their church or co-conspirators, men whose core is completely at odds with their facades.

Guess which stereotype scuttled Mitt Romney's campaign.

One of the ways that religious, racial, and sexual bigotry work is by creating stereotypes. The stereotypes attached to blacks and women are well-known and, for that reason, somewhat disarmed. Among most people, the stereotype of Mormons is squeaky-clean, to the point of being comic. But among evangelicals, there is a readily accessible body of literature that characterizes the Mormon church as a cult, a sinister, diabolical, and secret society that puts on a kindly, Christian, family-oriented face, but is secretly attempting to win the world to Satanism. And Mormon individuals are either dupes of their church or co-conspirators, men whose core is completely at odds with their facades.
Guess which stereotype scuttled Mitt Romney';s campaign.

I don't believe that winning was all that Governor Romney believed in. If that was all he believed in, he would still be in the race, and he would have run a much more underhanded campaign to date. Romney is not Machiavellian like most politicians. Just because McCain and Huckabee attacked Romney for "negative" campaigning doesn't mean that Romney's contrast ads were wrong, or even inaccurate unlike the blatantly false ads that McCain unleashed on the eve of the Florida primary and again before "Super Tuesday." But somehow, everyone believed the hype that Romney was the only negative campaigner.

With the end of Governor Romney's campaign, it is a sad day for conservatives in this country, but not as sad as election day will be, when we look at the ballot and realize that there is not even a candidate on the ballot who doesn't already have a residence with a Washington, D.C. zip code, and that there is little chance of any positive change in that town in the next four years.

I challenge anyone to step into the spotlight, and open themselves, their ideas, their past history, their family and friends, their career, their finances, their religious beliefs and everyone and everything associated with them to extreme public scrutiny 24 hours a day, seven days a week for over a year. If you take that challenge, see if you can seem authentic to everyone, all the time.

The career politicians have learned how to take on a persona and keep up appearances. Unfortunately for Romney's candidacy, he is not a career politician. Unfortunately for our country, we can't embrace a candidate who is not a career politician. That fact is incomprehensible to me. The word politician connotes dishonesty, disingenousness, selfishness, and powerlust. Yet we allow the media and other politicians to convince us that the one candidate who was not a true politician, who has a squeeky-clean past, who has lived a moral and ethical life, who has a history of success in what ails our country most right now (economy and universal health care) was not worthy of the office of President. Why? Because he didn't fit in with the political fraternity, or because his religion is not accepted as mainstream, or because he had too much money, or because he has changed his position on less than a handful of issues in the past 15 years of his life, or because some voters didn't always feel like he was their best friend, or because some voters felt like he was trying too hard to be their best friend. Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don't.

It seems like there is constantly an outcry from a portion of the electorate for a "common man" candidate. Someone who relates to the electorate personally. Someone who knows what it is like to be poor. Someone who isn't tainted by special interests and Washington politics. Yet we also want someone who appears presidential, who has skills and a track-record of success, and who has the financial stability to take two or more years of their life away from work to travel around the country and promote their candidacy independent of special interest financing. We want someone who is ethical and has good judgment, who doesn't have scandalous skeletons in the closet. We want someone who sounds down-to-earth and folksy when he is talking to the down-home crowd, but brilliant and polished when he is talking to the elite crowd. Yet we want consistency. Do we realize that the attributes we desire are frequently contradictory, and there is no one who fits all of the requirements we impose on a presidential candidate? Governor Romney was as good a man and potentially as good a president as we could have hoped for, but somehow his candidacy was mortally wounded by imperfections that are common to you and me.