Pretty high price to pay simply because some of you are hysterically afraid of a Mormon. Well better a Mormon then a moron in the White House. Right now those are our only two choices.
Posted on 02/04/2008 8:20:41 PM PST by JRochelle
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.
In Utah, however, all was not forgiven.
“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 Huckabee campaign did not respond to e-mail and phone requests for comment.
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.
He does. He sticks to one line when he wants the vote from liberals in MA and another line when he wants the vote from conservatives in the GOP primary
SOunds like you are preparing to preach your own version of the Gospels. Why should we listen to you?
I recently read a column about how Mormons are to Christians what Jews for Jesus are to Jews.
Would you ever vote for a Jew for Jesus candidate?
( ..he walks slowly, backwards, out of the room...)
“FACE IT — social conservatives do not trust Romney!!!!!”
That would be why Romney has won among self identified conservatives in almost every state, right?
Oh, and thank you for the “!!!!!”, it really helped me understand your opinion better.
Well all I can say is just because everyone else does it, it doesn’t make it right.
I hear many say the Huckester should get out of the race, why don’t I hear the same people say L Ron Paul should also leave. He is eating up votes from republicns who could win.
McCain moved to the left after the 2000 election. I wouldn’t put too much stock in anything he said before then.
Pretty high price to pay simply because some of you are hysterically afraid of a Mormon. Well better a Mormon then a moron in the White House. Right now those are our only two choices.
With "Moderate" being applicable to the 5% or less who end up running the party (the folks we know as countryclubbers), this gives a great distortion to the results since all these guys say they like McCain over any other candidate.
Consequently Romney should do much better than predicted by the major polls, and probably a lot better than his own pollsters think.
Where do you live? Jaspar? DO you hang dogs too?
Later, Fatboy Jr. tried to sneak a loaded gun onto an airplane! You wanna bet ol' sh!t for brains ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer?
ROFL! I suspect koala.
“The whole line that Huckabee should drop out in order to stop McCain is stupid.”
Of course it is. Huck’s being in the there keeps McCain from walking away with the South, which would probably happen otherwise and would pretty much assure Mr. Amnesty the victory.
“Would you ever vote for a Jew for Jesus candidate?”
Why not? Pretty much all religions seem equally nutty to me, though admittedly none of the others seem as violent as Islam.
And you knew better.
The whole point of your post was to discredit a candidate because one of his children misbehaved.
How utterly foolish and juvenile of you.
That’s what frost’s me, the poor religious conservatives who felt put upon by mean ol wepublican wino’s are doing the same thing to Mitt Romney and those of us who support him.
It’s a quandary eh?
Reading these threads can be like pulling teeth, I congratulate you for sticking to your guns (figuratively speaking).
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