The Washington Post has not noticed the United States is a country that is tolerant of religions, especially where it concerns out electoral system. This week the Washington Post has published a long story filled with innuendo that Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith is somehow engaged in a conspiracy to make him president.
The more than 3,000 word piece is also filled with pop psychology and subtle rhetoric all intended to make the reader simultaneously suspicious of Romney and his religion, as well as doubting that any of his life is his own. The Post implies Romney has been programmed by his father, his wife and his religion. This isn’t the only time WaPo writer Jason Horowitz investigated “Mitt’s suspicious” Mormonism, either. In June, Horowitz wonders if Romney’s Mormonism was “fair game” for attack.
At the outset of his newest, near slanderous piece, Horowitz calls Mitt a “political scion” because his father was once the Governor of Michigan. Of course, George Romney was also a successful career auto man, as well. Why isn’t Mitt an “auto scion”? We know why. Horowitz is trying to cast Mr. Romney as a member of some privileged class who expects public office will be bestowed upon him as his birthright.
Next Horowitz tells us that “Romney confided to a Bain and Co. colleague about the trajectory sketched out for him by his father.”
This is written as if Mitt is just a robot not in control of his own destiny. Of course, every interested father tries to “sketch out” for his children a way of comportment that will lead to a successful life, but this sentence makes it seem as if George Romney pre-planned Mitt’s whole life, an absurd contention.
… and this is just the first paragraph!
Paragraph three is just dripping with condescension and jealousy.
Romney has followed his father s road map. By the early 1990s, he had matured from his days as a privileged youth to build a family, a fortune, and a flock as the leader of his church in the Boston area. He also grew receptive to encouragement from family members and others who considered him born and bred to replace less-perfect men in power. They wanted Romney to take on Ted Kennedy in 1994.
Look at all that castigation. “Privileged youth” and “born and bred to replace less-perfect men in power”? Horowitz is attempting to paint Romney as one of the most arrogant and conceited men alive, isn’t he? I mean, who has said that Mitt Romney and his family think they are destined for politics because they are more perfect than those in power?
Where does Horowitz get this characterization? Well, he doesn’t bother to say, meaning that this is his own emotions coming out not an assessment of Mitt’s biography based on facts or eyewitness testimony.
Rhetoric like this is seeded throughout the long article all aimed at making the reader look upon Romney with suspicion and disdain.
But it was Horowitz’ innuendo-filled discussion of the Mormon Church that really casts this article as one of the lowest of the low.
Horowitz claims that Mitt didn’t really set his mind to politics until his father-in-law, Edward Davies, died from cancer. Davies, Horowitz says, urged Mitt and Ann to “make the most of her life now, and to capitalize on the opportunities bestowed” upon them. As Mitt and his brothers-in-law went to a Mormon Temple where they “donned white robes” they watched the man’s body baptized posthumously. Apparently we are to be left finding this all to be weird behavior.
Next Horowitz said that one of Mitt’s actions before he ran unsuccessfully against Senator Ted Kennedy in 1994 was to “unload all the unnecessary baggage possible.” This “baggage,” Horowitz tells us, included his church obligations.
The writer went on to discuss how Mitt went to his church officials to ask them to give him a pass on his recently undertaken church obligations but what followed is where Horowitz seems to imply that Mitt and his church leaders then went about planning his entire 1994 run for the Senate and his later trajectory to the White House.
Yet Romney’s connections in the church proved critical at the inception of his political career. Months before the hierarchy released him from his obligations as Boston s highest church authority, Romney called Richard Bitner Wirthlin, Reagan’s chief strategist and pollster, who had become a high-ranking church official in Salt Lake City.
Howorwitz the recounts that Jeralie Wirthlin, the above’s widow, said Romney visited her husband in their Utah home. “They counseled together early on,” she said.
Howrowitz also notes that a Romney biographer said that, “Romney told him of the polling and a trip Romney made to Salt Lake City with Wirthlin, whose half first cousin was the church s president, Gordon Bitner Hinckley.”
Perhaps we are all supposed to imagine that Romney’s political plans was all a Mormon plot?
That’s not all. As Matt Vespa notes, “Even after Romney was defeated in the 94 race, his tenure at the Winter Olympics was due to Mormon design.”
Horowitz says that Ken Gardner, a “a Utah developer and the Boston church s former mission president,” was the main man to engage Ann Romney to convince her husband to take on the Winter Olympics.
Horowitz even says that Ann Romney told someone that God wanted Mitt to run for president. The 2008 run was something “God wanted him to do” Horowitz says Ann told Dennis King, a “fellow Mormon.”
All this talk of Mormons, secret meetings, and programming by faith and family seems very much intended to make the reader suspicious of Mitt Romney’s religion. With all his suspicions about religion, one wonders if Jason Horowitz ever wrote a piece worrying over Barack Obama’s deep and disturbing connection with the dangerous and volatile Black Liberation Theology learned at the feet of Reverend Jeremiah Wright? I’ve looked and can’t find one. Maybe Horowitz only finds Mormonism to be suspicious.
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