Frank Rich, The New York Times, December 16, 2007
This campaign season has been in desperate need of its own reincarnation of Howard Beale from “Network”: a TV talking head who would get mad as hell and not take it anymore. Last weekend that prayer was answered when Lawrence O’Donnell, an excitable Democratic analyst, seized a YouTube moment while appearing on one of the Beltway’s more repellent Sunday bloviathons, “The McLaughlin Group.”
Pushed over the edge by his peers’ polite chatter about Mitt Romney’s sermon on “Faith in America,” Mr. O’Donnell branded the speech “the worst” of his lifetime. Then he went on a rampage about Mr. Romney’s Mormon religion, shouting (among other things) that until 1978 it was “an officially racist faith.”
That claim just happens to be true. As the jaws of his scandalized co-stars dropped around him, Mr. O’Donnell then raised the rude question that almost no one in Washington asks aloud: Why didn’t Mr. Romney publicly renounce his church’s discriminatory practices before they were revoked? As the scion of one of America’s most prominent Mormon families, he might have made a difference. It’s not as if he was a toddler. By 1978 — the same year his contemporary, Bill Clinton, was elected governor in Arkansas — Mr. Romney had entered his 30s.
The answer is simple. Mr. Romney didn’t fight his church’s institutionalized apartheid, whatever his private misgivings, because that’s his character. Though he is trying to sell himself as a leader, he is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his flip-flops on nearly every issue.
Concern for minorities isn’t a high priority either. The Christian Science Monitor and others have published reports that Mr. Romney has said he wouldn’t include a Muslim in his cabinet. (He denies it.) In “Faith in America,” he exempted Americans who don’t practice a religion from “freedom” and warned ominously of shadowy, unidentified cabalists “intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism.” Perhaps today, in his scheduled turn on “Meet the Press,” he will inveigh against a new war on Christmas being plotted by an axis of evil composed of Muslims, secularists and illegal immigrants.