Several polls have been taken to assess Americans’ willingness to vote for a Mormon in a presidential race. They’ve all shown a startling reluctance to consider a Mormon for the nation’s highest office. This has led some to conclude that Mitt Romney will be easy to beat if he is the Republican nominee. Yet, I wonder how much an issue it will be if the Democrats aren’t morally corrupt enough to exploit it. Unsurprisingly, the Republicans have no such qualms:
Residents in New Hampshire and Iowa have received phone calls raising questions about Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, his Mormon faith and the Vietnam War-era military deferments he received while serving as a missionary in France.
Western Wats, a Utah-based company, placed the calls that initially sound like a poll but then pose questions that cast Romney in a harsh light, according to those who received the calls. In politics, this type of phone surveying is called “push polling” — contacting potential voters and asking questions intended to plant a message in voters’ minds, usually negative, rather than gauging peoples’ attitudes.
Standard Republican operating procedure.
Among the questions was whether a resident knew that Romney was a Mormon, that he received military deferments when he served as a Mormon missionary in France, that his five sons did not serve in the military, that Romney’s faith did not accept blacks as bishops into the 1970s and that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible.
“It started out like all the other calls. … Then all of the sudden it got very unsettling and very negative,” said Anne Baker, an independent voter from Hollis, N.H.
Would the Democrats do the same thing in a general election? I hope not. On the other hand, our unwillingness to do this kind of dirty campaigning is one of the reasons we always enter presidential campaigns at a disadvantage.
What do you think?
