Ok, so Mitt Romney has announced his candidacy for President. How will his Mormon faith help or hurt him and if it hurts him, would he win anywhere outside of Utah or Idaho?
This should really be in GD, not GQ.
That said, he has repeatedly said that he wants to keep his faith and his politics separate. When Sridhar Pappu, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, asked him bluntly “How Mormon are you?”, here’s what he replied:
It sounds like he’s trying to speak the language of the evangelicals; the real question is whether or not there’s too much knee-jerk anti-Mormon prejudice out there for such pronouncements to overcome.
Oh, and the following quote from the same article is just too good not to share:
Many, many people have very negative opinions on Mormonism, regarding it as a cult and a non-Christian religion. Ultimately, I don’t think he’ll be nominated for President, though he might get the VP nod.
His whole comedy routine would be funny if it didn’t consist solely of that joke. Told endlessly.
Probably more of a Great Debate than a General Question. Moved.
samclem GQ moderator
The Mormon thing matters a great deal to a substantial segment of the Pub base, I’m afraid, and we can’t expect that to change in this decade or the next. See this Pit thread.
When he wanted to be elected governor of Massachusetts he sucked up to the social liberals. Fooled a lot of them into voting for him. Then he spent large chunks of his term out of state preparing to run for president. We hardly ever saw him over the last couple of years, except for photo ops at anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage hooraws.
Now he’s sucking up to the fundamentalist hardliners. Figures he can fool them into thinking he’s one of them. I take great delight in the thought that all his pandering to prejudice will not help him against the anti-Mormon prejudice of the Protestant far right.
I have a general theory that a candidate won’t be president if they are unlikely to be able to win in the state in which they last held public office. It just looks too bad to the rest of the country to have the voters that are most familiar with the candidates record decline to vote for him.
So Romney won’t be president, not because he’s Mormon but because he was last governor of Massachucettes. Same for Guliani and probably Edwards as well.
Bet he’ll finally be able to bring Utah into the Republican column though 
How do you know he was fooling anyone? Not that I agree with the man, but perhaps he really did change his political stance.
Have you seen the video that’s making the rounds of Romney when he was running for governor? Compare what he said then to what he’s saying now. Oh, and there’s another news clip of him recently joking to some ultra-conservative group about “How could a conservative like me get elected in a liberal state like that?” with this self-satisfied smirk that made me want to throw a boot at the TV while screaming “By lying your ass off, you fucking hypocrite!”
He sucked 'em in the way Dubya sucked 'em in with that “compassionate conservative” crap.
Um, it’s true I may be a bit biased in my assessment here.
Romney doesn’t even stand a chance of winning the primary. Even if it looks like he’ll pull ahead, all an opponent has to do is remind the voters that he didn’t have the political strength to prevent gay marriage from remaining legal in Massachusetts.
He has flip-flopped too much. I have crossed him off my list.
We’ve done a couple of these “[Potential 2008 Republican Candiate X] for President” though, and the front runners always get divided into two camps: those that won’t get the nomination because their not conservative enough (Gulliani, Romney, (somewhat bizarrely) McCain) and those who won’t get nominated because they are too conservative to win the general election (Brownback, Hunter, Gingrich). At the end of the day they have to nominate someone, and if its all they’ve got they’ll have to either pull someone who doesn’t seem particularly electable, or use Romney or someone else who has questionable conservative credentials.
So true. 
Which is why I expect Huckabee to emerge.
Finally? Utah hasn’t voted for a Democratic candidate for President since 1964.
That was a joke son, a joke. Notice the winking smile. He wasn’t flirting with you, he was indicating it was a joke.
Moderates will vote for Rudy or McCain. The Fundies will vote for someone like Brownback. Where is the support for a Mormon, wishy-washy candidate with no credentials to appeal to any major portion of the Republican party.
Jim
Can’t we rule out candidates who we already know in advance won’t even win their home states?
Romney’s one. He didn’t run for re-election as governor because he knew he had no chance,. He was elected as somebody who looked like he could actually run the state government, claiming he’d use his variety of business contacts to attract investment and jobs. Instead, he used those contacts only to get campaign donations, and spent those four years in a combination of pursuing personal spite (including the gay marriage stuff, targeted at the South Carolina Primary rather than the Massachusetts governorship) and spending the rest of his time outside the state to run for President, making endless speeches about how it’s all the fault of those damn Massachusetts liberals that he couldn’t accomplish anything. I don’t know of anybody here who misses him, or even who thinks another Republican can get elected Governor for another generation now. Give him credit for cleanness, though - there was never a hint of actual corruption in the Romney administration, just disengagedness and incompetence and, above all, spite. It’s no coincidence that he chose a different state to make his announcement - he pissed away any support he used to have here.
His LG lost the campaign for governor pretty badly after having the mismanagement of the Big Dig by that administration hung around her neck. If Romney ever starts to look like a real threat, expect to see “Let’s look at his record” ads from the other candidates.
To his religion: Didn’t matter in Mass., where Catholicism has been a traditional job requirement for politicians. I doubt it will matter much to people looking for a President who’ll finally take care of the baby-killers and queers, either.
I agree-Romney was a completely ineffective MAssachusetts governor. He ignored the disasters unfolding aound him (Big Dig, outrageous school construction corruption, automobile insurance fraud, etc.), and also refused to work (with the admittedly corrupt legislative leadership). I do give him credit for trying to resucitate the moribund MA republican party-he ran some excellent candidates-but they all lost! You cannot revive a corpse, so romney is bailing. as far as being a Mormon-nobody here had much of an issue with it. It won’t play well in the South, though, and as i say, he hasn’t much of a record of accomplishment in MA.
There’s not much left of the MA GOP now, Ralph. They have *no * elected officials higher than sheriff anymore, their membership in both Houses has dropped even further to all-time record lows (the Senate GOP caucus could *literally * convene in a McDonald’s booth), and there’s no promising young faces to provide hope for the future for 'em. I don’t see what to give Romney credit for there.
But a one-party state can be fun to watch. It effectively means a no-party state, with only minimal policy debate, leaving room for everyone to spend time pursuing personal agendas and vendettas. MA politics is largely about who’s trying to get who and how, and the techniques have been developed over the generations to such a high degree of sophistication that MA operators are highly valued members of national campaigns. Even Dubya had his Andy Card, for instance. We probably should have foreseen that Romney would immediately go native, as well.