Weaselness From Frank Rich

Latter-Day Republicans vs. the Church of Oprah

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.

Y’know, this guy is seriously an asshat! I guess he’s forgotten about all the filibusters against the Civil Rights Act held by PROMINENT Democrats. Sadly, discrimination is a part of our history. I went to a segregated church too, and school and truth be told, ya didn’t see many black people shopping at the same stores, or eating in the same restaurants. Expecting over night change is just juvenile.

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.

Honestly, I wouldn’t put a Muslim on my cabinet either. Not because I believe all Muslims are terrorists, but because the majority of terrorists are Muslims. What we know about Islam is NOT compatible to a democracy. Why on earth would he name a follower of that particular faith on a democratic cabinet?

As Mr. O’Donnell said in his tirade, it’s incredible that Mr. Romney’s prejudices get a free pass from so many commentators. “Faith in America” was hyped in advance as one of the year’s “big, emotional campaign moments” by Mark Halperin of Time. In its wake, the dean of Beltway opinion, David Broder of The Washington Post, praised Mr. Romney for possessing values “exactly those I would hope a leader would have.”

Yet they continuously give people like Robert ‘KKK’ Byrd a free pass.

Beltway hands thought they knew how to frame the Romney speech because they assumed (incorrectly) that it would build on the historical precedent set by J.F.K. When they analyzed the three-state Oprah-Obama tour, they again reached for historical precedent and were bamboozled once more — this time because there really was no precedent.

Most could only see Oprah Winfrey’s contribution to Barack Obama’s campaign as just another celebrity endorsement, however high-powered. The Boss, we kept being reminded, couldn’t elect John Kerry. Selling presidents is not the same as pushing “Anna Karenina.” In a typical instance of tone-deafness from the Clinton camp, its national co-chairman, the former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, said of Oprah, “I’m not sure who watches her.”

The best I can figure, the people who watch Oprah are women. Women who have nothing better to do with their lives, and live vicariously through those Oprah has on her show. I can’t say for sure though, because I don’t watch her.

“Church free” is the key. This country has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not acceptable religious and moral practice. Instead of handing down tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified, live-and-let-live democracy that is greater than the sum of its countless disparate denominations. The pitch — or, to those who are not fans, the shtick — may be corny. “The audacity of hope” is corny too. But corn is preferable to holier-than-thou, and not just in Iowa.

Just how does this feckless weasel think we got into the mess we’re in now? We’ve already become ‘church free’. We need to move back towards a faith foundation!

I’d argue instead that any sizable racist anti-Obama vote will be concentrated in states that no Democrat would carry in the general election. Otherwise, race may be either a neutral or positive factor for the Obama campaign. Check out the composition of Oprah’s television flock, which, like all daytime audiences, is largely female. Her viewers are overwhelmingly white (some 80 percent), blue collar (nearly half with incomes under $40,000) and older (50-plus). This is hardly the chardonnay-sipping, NPR-addicted, bicoastal hipster crowd that many assume to be Mr. Obama’s largest white constituency. They share the profile of Clinton Democrats — and of some Republicans too.

Voting for someone because of color, or religion, or gender, or because some mega star is on his, or her, bandwagon? Unless you can sit down, look at ALL the issues, and make an informed decision, you shouldn’t even be allowed to vote. Voting is a privaledge, and we’ve turned it into a popularity contest.

I don’t care if no one liked you in high school, or if you were the big ‘man’ on campus. I DO care if you can stand up against the bad guys, if you are going overhaul the illegal doin’s of the IRS, if you are going to secure our borders, and stop giving illegals free run of the country. I care very much if you are going to push the idea of ‘hand up’ and knock off the hand out crap. There are a LOT of things I care about, but whether or not you have Oprah’s endorsement, or Joe Lieberman’s, or Pat Robertson’s, is not on my list.

Cross posted – An Ol’ Broad’s Ramblings