A Stitch in Haste

"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end — where all men and all churches are treated as equal — where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice — where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind — and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."
--John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1960

"I saw first hand the liberal future, and it doesn't work."
--Mitt Romney, March 2, 2007

Romney himself would probably be the first to insist that "he's no Jack Kennedy." But that won't stop him from planning a Kennedy-style speech to assuage concerns over his Mormonism:

Romney said it's too early to decide what he would say in such a speech, largely because he hasn't made a final decision to deliver such a talk.

In March, a Gallup poll found that 46 percent had a negative opinion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant group, considers the LDS church a cult and many other Christian denominations also do not recognize Mormon baptism.
...
"I expect that evangelical Christians who believe in life and family values are going to vote for someone who shares their views and has a real prospect of being nominated by our party and becoming president," Romney told the AP.

Yeah right, good luck with that...

A few hasty stitches:

1. The issue underlying Kennedy's speech was not his Catholicism per se, but whether he could remain independent of the Vatican. Although the answer both before and after the 1960 election appeared to be "yes," the question of how Catholic politicians are expected to behave still resurfaces from time to time.

That's not the challenge facing Romney, however. There is no "pope" in Mormonism — there aren't even professional clerics. Just a bureaucrat who, while nominally called a "prophet," is not an autocratic or deemed-infallible ruler analogous to the Bishop of Rome. There is no one in LDS who could conceivably "pull Romney's strings" the way that John XXIII could conceivably have manipulated Kennedy.

Which makes the notion of a major "Mormon speech" by Romney essentially irrelevant. Voters aren't afraid of President Romney kowtowing to President Hinckley. They just happen to think that: (a) Mormons are weird; (b) Mormonism is at odds with much of the rest of Christianity, and (c) Romney is a disingenuous, flip-flopping moral defective panderer. And, since all three statements are factually correct, all the speeches in the world won't help Romney the way Kennedy's speech helped him. Kennedy was debunking a myth. How exactly can Romney debunk the truth?

2. Kennedy delivered his "Catholic speech" in September 1960 — after he had already won the Democratic nomination. He was making an appeal to the other side, not his own base. Romney, meanwhile, is trying to allay the fears of the very people who ought to be his most fervent supporters — theocrats, bigots and other radical social conservatives. So again, the idea that he can simply "pull a Kennedy" is counterintuitive at best.

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Just to clarify: To me, "weird" is not an insult. I'm undoubtedly weirder than the median Mormon. But then again, I'm not running for president.