Tag: presidential election

The establishment v. the antiestablishment

Glenn Greenwald’s post today on Salon is worth reading to get a sense as to why the more interesting candidates out there — in particular, John Edwards, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul — are treated as little more than novelties (in the case of Huckabee and Paul) or nuisances (in the case of Edwards).

(T)here is a clear dichotomy in both the Republican and Democratic fields — one which is a microcosm of our political system generally — of establishment candidates versus anti-establishment candidates. Edwards, Paul and Huckabee are clearly the latter. And that certainly explains a large part of how the media insufficiently covers their campaigns.

By definition, our most influential media outlets are vital parts of the establishment and dependent upon it in countless ways. They perceive attacks on the establishment to be attacks on them. And thus, most journalists are instinctively hostile to candidates which are outside and critical of that establishment. Journalists just don’t believe that the system on which they depend and which gives them their access and purpose can possibly be fundamentally broken or corrupt. They are, after all, the establishment press.

Such outsider candidates begin as the nerdy losers to be held up by our campaign journalists for adolescent, giggly mockery. If their campaigns prosper, they become the target of outright hostility (see, e.g., the media’s role in the destruction of Howard Dean’s candidacy in 2003). In different ways, that has been the arc of media treatment accorded to Paul, Huckabee and Edwards, all of whose candidacies — for better or worse — represent something significant in our political culture, represent direct challenges to prevailing conventional pieties and dominant power centers, and yet (or, rather, therefore) are treated as silly jokes when they are discussed at all.

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On religious chauvinism

Joe Conason offers a succinct and on-target take on the dust-up over Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and the GOP evangelical base’s antipathy toward him.

The issue is not whether a Mormon should be elected or could be elected, but why we should allow those who wish to impose their sense of faith on the American public. Romney, after all, offered this comment as part of his speech:

“Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom … Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”

As Conason writes, however,

This statement is so patently false that it scarcely deserves refutation. If Romney has studied the bloody history of his own church, then he knows that the religious fervor of its adversaries drove them to deprive the Mormons not only of their freedom but their lives, and that the Mormons reacted in kind. If he has studied the bloody history of the world’s older religions, then he knows that the most devout Christians of all sects have not hesitated to suppress, torture and murder “heretics” throughout history. Only the strictest separation of church and state has permitted the establishment of societies where freedom of conscience prevails — and those freedoms are firmly rooted in societies where organized religion has long been in decline.

That’s what makes the discussion about Romney important; it’s not the electoral math, but the constitutional implications of connecting religion and government.

And it is the implied religious chauvinism of Romney and former Arkansas Go. Mike Huckabee that should worry us all.

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals — including agnostics and atheists — have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader — which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid’s religion.

Liberals and progressives have no apologies to make, or at least no more than libertarians and conservatives do. Cherishing the freedoms protected by a secular society need not imply any disrespect for religion. But when candidates like Romney and Huckabee press the boundaries of the Constitution to promote themselves as candidates of faith, it is time to push back.

I couldn’t agree more.

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The Romney speech

Mitt Romney’s speech today, in which he attempted to “address concerns” that apparently come from a significant portion of Republican voters about his Mormon beliefs, is going to be dissected, bissected and generally revisited ad nauseum by those vapid pundits who populate cable news.

While I won’t comment directly on it (I’ll let John Nichols do so), the speech is worth noting:

The former Massachusetts governor — the first major Mormon candidate for president — has seen his support slip recently in the early battleground state of Iowa amid misgivings by some Christians, particularly evangelicals, about his religion.

So in a 20-minute address billed as his definitive response to the issue, Romney said he was seeking to be a leader for Americans of all faiths, not just his own.

“If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no religion, no one group, no one cause,” Romney said, eliciting applause from the audience at the George Bush Presidential Library here on the campus of Texas A&M University.

“There are some for whom those commitments are not enough,” he added. “They would prefer it if I would simply distance myself from my religion, say it is more of a tradition than my personal conviction, or disavow one or another of its precepts. That I will not do. I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers.”

Romney even struck a note of defiance, suggesting at one point that he understood his Mormon faith could cost him some votes. But he predicted that Americans would ultimately respect him for sticking to his beliefs, noting that the United States had a proud tradition of religious tolerance that began with the founding fathers.

“Some believe that such a confession will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it,” he said. “But I think they underestimate the American people. Americans do not respect believers of convenience. Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.”

What strikes me about this, however, is not the potential political implications. What strikes me is that, in the year 2007, we still view some religions as suspect. The speech, in many ways, should not have been necessary.

That Romney and the political establishment seemed to think it was says a lot more about that segment of Republican voting base — and the pundit class — than it does about Romney. His religion just shouldn’t matter.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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I think I hear the airleaking from the Guiliani campaign

These kins of stories are popping up more and more about America’s mayor. Bernard Kerik, extramarital affairs and budgetary chicanery, unsavory connections — Republicans, this is your presidential candidate.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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