Utah's Mormons loathe Huckabee

Of all the possible Super Tuesday outcomes, one is more certain than any other: Mike Huckabee will not carry the state of Utah.

In large part it’s because Mitt Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the man credited with saving the Salt Lake City Olympics, is more popular here than in any other state.

But the other reason is that overwhelmingly Mormon Utah has taken a profound dislike to the Southern Baptist preacher best known for his nice-guy persona.

The wellspring of Huckabee hate is a now-famous Dec. 16 New York Times Magazine interview in which the former Arkansas governor, in an “innocent voice,” is reported to have asked, “Don’t Mormons ... believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”

To Mormons, Huckabee’s eyebrow-raising question represented not only a gross distortion of their beliefs but also a carefully calculated move by a Christian politician who surely knew better.

Huckabee’s remark prompted Romney to call the comments “just not the American way” on NBC’s “Today” show.

Huckabee quickly apologized, saying that Romney’s Mormonism had nothing to do with whether he should be president. With that, the candidates and the national media moved on to other topics.

“There is a feeling that Huckabee has exploited a lot of the anti-Mormon sentiment,” said LaVarr Webb, a political consultant and publisher in Utah.

“The feeling is that he would certainly know the answers to these questions that he’s been asking sometimes,” said Chuck Gates, assistant managing editor of Utah’s Deseret Morning News.

According to Webb and other state political insiders interviewed by Politico, many Mormons maintain that Huckabee’s apology did not go nearly far enough.

Quin Monson, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University, says many observers believe that “evangelicals have rejected Romney, and that Huckabee is aiding and abetting that. ... He’s egging it on.”

As it turns out, this isn’t the first time that Huckabee has rubbed Utahans the wrong way. In the summer of 1998, then-Arkansas Gov. Huckabee, along with fellow national church leaders, attended the National Southern Baptist Convention in Salt Lake City.

At the time, the decision to hold the event in the shadow of the Mormon Tabernacle was viewed by many Mormons as an insulting stab directed at the very heart of the LDS church.

Worse, according to an account published in the Salt Lake Tribune during the convention, some 2,000 “messengers” of the Southern Baptist Convention went door to door in Utah and proselytized, “armed with questionnaires and their personal belief in Jesus Christ as their savior.”

Because of his participation in that convention and because of his theological background, many Utahans believe that Huckabee has been deeply disingenuous throughout the campaign — not just in one well-publicized interview — in his approach toward the issue of Romney’s Mormon faith.

The Baptists’ choice of Salt Lake City was a deliberate one, said James Guth, a leading authority on the influence of religion in politics and professor at Furman University.

The Baptists intended to “create a new mission field.” Mormons and the Southern Baptists, he explained, are members of “competing missionary religions.”

“It used to be that the Mormons were in Utah and Southern Baptists were in the South,” Guth said. “Now, Mormons are all over the world, and Southern Baptists want to be all over the world.”

Aside from the issue of clashing faiths, there is a more practical component to Huckabee’s unpopularity.

There is a widespread belief, not just in Utah but among many Romney partisans, that Huckabee’s long-shot — and lingering — candidacy is serving little purpose other than to siphon votes from Romney, Utah’s adopted son, by splitting the conservative vote against John McCain.

“There’s just the feeling that if we really wanted to unite behind a conservative candidate, we would unite behind Romney,” said Dave Hansen, former campaign manager for Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah).

“You can’t force [Huckabee] out, but all things considered, I think there are a lot of conservatives who wish he were not still in the race.”

In the unlikely event that Huckabee does capture the Republican nomination, his Utah baggage could come back to haunt him.

In the deeply red state where President Bush still maintains some of his highest approval ratings, a place that has ranked as the most Republican state in the nation in six of the past eight presidential elections, a BYU poll released Monday reveals that Huckabee would pull off the seemingly impossible.

As GOP nominee, he would lose the state of Utah in a hypothetical matchup with Democrat Barack Obama, 58 percent to 42 percent.

Romney, by contrast, would defeat Obama 69 percent to 31 percent. McCain would also win against Obama, though by a more modest 55 percent to 45 percent.

Still, there are limits to how much Utah dislikes Huckabee: In a head-to-head matchup with Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, Huckabee wins handily, 60 percent to 41 percent.

Yes, life is an important issue. Here is an important statement on it from a prolife supporter of ROmney:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWYwMzg3MzZkNDBmYzJhMGY5OTY5MjI3YTYxYzFkNDE=

There is no doubt that Governor Mitt Romney is running unabashedly as a pro-life and pro-family candidate for president and that he wants Roe v. Wade overturned. But his sincerity is being questioned because, as he has acknowledged, he has changed his mind on these issues. In 1994, in his race against Teddy Kennedy for the U.S. Senate, and in his 2002 race for governor of Massachusetts, Romney was pro-choice on abortion. So it is right to question him about the sincerity of his conversion.

Romney’s conversion was less abrupt than is often portrayed. In his 1994 Senate run, Romney was endorsed by Massachusetts Citizens for Life and kept their endorsement, even though he declared himself to be pro-choice, because he supported parental-consent laws, opposed taxpayer-funded abortion and mandatory abortion coverage under a national health insurance plan, and was against the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have codified Roe v. Wade by federal statute. In 1994, NARAL’s Kate Michelman pronounced him a phony pro-choicer. “Mitt Romney, stop pretending,” she demanded. “We need honesty in our public life, not your campaign of deception to conceal your anti-choice views,” she said. Some conservative Boston newspaper columnists view it similarly. As Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe put it: “Romney’s very public migration rightward over the last few years is . . . intended not to hide his real views but to liberate them. In 1994, Romney struck me as an extraordinarily bright, talented, and decent man — and a political neophyte who fell for the canard that the only way a conservative could win in Massachusetts was by passing for liberal.”

In 2001, Romney said, in a letter to the Salt Lake Tribute, that he believes that “abortion is the wrong choice, but under the law it is a choice people have.” And in the 2002 governor’s race, Romney made clear that “on a personal basis, I don’t favor abortion,” that he opposed lowering the age at which minors could obtain abortions without parental consent to 16, and that he supported a ban on partial-birth abortions, but that, as governor, he would “protect the right of a woman to choose under the law of the country and the laws of the commonwealth.” As one Boston commentator observed, Romney’s “abortion statements sound as much like someone trying to wrestle with the issue as someone trying to weasel his way out of it.”

Romney now says that he was wrong about abortion in those years, that his position has “evolved and deepened” as governor, and that he is “firmly pro-life.”

The evaluation of Romney’s conversion needs to be considered in light of the pro-life movement’s consistent effort over the years to educate, and thereby convert, people to the cause. The pro-life movement has aggressively promoted conversion and has achieved great success in doing so. Today, for the first time since Roe v. Wade, a majority of Americans identify themselves as pro-life, and many of these are converts, some who have even had abortions themselves. Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, both pro-life presidents, were converts. In 1967, Reagan, as governor of California, signed into law the nation’s most permissive abortion law, and, in 1980, Bush ran as an unabashedly pro-choice candidate. Both were unswerving in their support for the pro-life position as president, and Reagan’s ability and willingness to articulate the pro-life position was invaluable.

Yet how is the sincerity of a conversion to be measured? There are two salient considerations in this regard: first, some defining moment that prompted a change of heart; second, the fact that deeds speak louder than words. Romney’s conversion exhibits both. First, Romney has had a life-changing event. It was when he was governor and researchers were proposing embryonic cloning at Harvard. As he recounts it, one of the researchers said that there “wasn’t a moral issue, because . . . they destroy the embryos at 14 days.” Romney said that “it struck me that we have so cheapened the value of human life in this country through our Roe v. Wade decision that someone could think that there is no moral issue to have racks and racks of living human embryos and then destroying them at 14 days.”

This was not a trivial matter for Romney and his family. As he told the New York Times at the time, “My wife has MS and we would love for there to be a cure for her disease and for the diseases of others. But there is an ethical boundary that should not be crossed.”

And Romney, as governor, acted on these convictions. He vetoed an embryonic cloning bill; he vetoed a bill that would allow the “morning after pill” to be acquired without a prescription on the grounds that it is an abortifacient; he vetoed legislation which would have redefined Massachusetts longstanding definition of the beginning of human life from fertilization to implantation; and he fought to promote abstinence education in the classroom. One should not underestimate the tremendous political price that Governor Romney paid in Massachusetts for these acts. Both conviction and courage are necessary for effective pro-life leadership, and Romney, in office, displayed both.

These actions as governor have lead leaders of the most important social conservative groups in Massachusetts, including Massachusetts Citizens for Life, Massachusetts Family Institute, and the Knights of Columbus, to observe that, while previous comments by Romney “are, taken by themselves, obviously worrisome to social conservatives including ourselves, they do not dovetail with the actions of Governor Romney from 2003 until now — and those actions positively and demonstrably impacted the social climate of Massachusetts.” They conclude that Romney “demonstrat[ed] [his] solid social conservative credentials by undertaking” these actions, and has therefore “proven that he shares our values, as well as our determination to protect them.”

Many social conservatives do not share Romney’s Mormon faith, but his faith should be viewed by social conservatives as a good sign, not as a matter of concern. The Mormon religion, while having tenets that Christians do not share, is profoundly conservative in its support for life, family, and marriage. Thus, Romney’s religion reinforces, rather than conflicts with, his conversion. All people of faith believe that the best public officials are those with God, not man, at the center of their lives.

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"I’m not a Mormon and I’ve never even been to Utah. I loathe Huckabee’s left wing politics. Nothing personal. I don’t hate him. I don’t know him. I’m sure he’s a nice guy. I just don’t like liberals." - Eric Blair 2084