Richard Whalen

Goaded by Mike Huckabee’s rise in the polls in Iowa, where the former Baptist minister has emerged as his strongest challenger, former Massachusetts’ Governor Mitt Romney deliberately injected his Mormon faith into the January 3rd caucuses.

In a sometimes eloquent but unoriginal televised speech that mentioned Mormonism only once, he concentrated on upholding America’s constitutional freedom of belief – which everyone accepts – in language that any presidential candidate would be comfortable with.

To fulfill his strategy and maintain the viability of his candidacy, Romney must win in Iowa (January 3) and New Hampshire (January 8). Whatever his inner motives for saying he would bare his soul, his speech did not shed any light on the mysteries of Mormonism – and therefore he will continue to face the same questions he left unanswered. So why raise the subject?

A false parallel is drawn between Romney and Senator John Kennedy’s speech in 1960 as a Roman Catholic to the Houston ministers. JFK had already won the Democratic presidential nomination and spoke as a potential president. Romney has yet to win anything and therefore benefits from the universal visibility his speech gave him. Did he deliberately create a false expectation? As Joe Kennedy once said: “There are no accidents in politics.”

Romney, who made his $250 million personal fortune as a Boston management consultant prior to entering politics, shrewdly saw this speech as an opportunity to advertise himself as a devout Christian, thereby implicitly answering the accusation that Mormonism is a “cult.” By failing to live up to the hyped advance billing from his camp, the speech positions Romney as a semi-victim of persecution from narrowly religious and aggressively secular sources. He is nothing of the sort.

George Romney, Mitt’s father, ran as a former Michigan Governor for the 1968 presidential nomination and never found it necessary to defend his Mormonism as he lost to Richard Nixon. This year, Mitt Romney said he would appose any religious test for the presidency but then left the complicated subject of Mormonism to the religious experts and theologians.

Mitt Romney is a supple politician who has been on both sides of abortion and same-sex marriage during his career. He wants to be a presidential candidate who proclaims: "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom,” and at the same time cries “foul” as a victim of bigotry.