Several polls have been taken to assess Americans’ willingness to vote for a Mormon in a presidential race. They’ve all shown a startling reluctance to consider a Mormon for the nation’s highest office. This has led some to conclude that Mitt Romney will be easy to beat if he is the Republican nominee. Yet, I wonder how much an issue it will be if the Democrats aren’t morally corrupt enough to exploit it. Unsurprisingly, the Republicans have no such qualms:
Residents in New Hampshire and Iowa have received phone calls raising questions about Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, his Mormon faith and the Vietnam War-era military deferments he received while serving as a missionary in France.
Western Wats, a Utah-based company, placed the calls that initially sound like a poll but then pose questions that cast Romney in a harsh light, according to those who received the calls. In politics, this type of phone surveying is called “push polling” — contacting potential voters and asking questions intended to plant a message in voters’ minds, usually negative, rather than gauging peoples’ attitudes.
Standard Republican operating procedure.
Among the questions was whether a resident knew that Romney was a Mormon, that he received military deferments when he served as a Mormon missionary in France, that his five sons did not serve in the military, that Romney’s faith did not accept blacks as bishops into the 1970s and that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible.
“It started out like all the other calls. … Then all of the sudden it got very unsettling and very negative,” said Anne Baker, an independent voter from Hollis, N.H.
Would the Democrats do the same thing in a general election? I hope not. On the other hand, our unwillingness to do this kind of dirty campaigning is one of the reasons we always enter presidential campaigns at a disadvantage.
What do you think?
The meek shall inherit the earth, but the ruthless shall inherit the White House…
“Would the Democrats do the same thing in a general election? I hope not.”
Really.
So knowing what you know now, you are GLAD Gore did not do this during the ’90 elections, and you would feel bad about him if he had.
So if it came down to florida in the next election, and Guliani was the candidate, you would prefer the democrat did not do push polls about his ex-wives (or other issues), even if it meant 8 more years of neo-con foreign policy and further shredding of the constitution?
Really.
nalbar
adoption of modern Republican morals, I would INDEED prefer to lose every election.
Then one can only be led to the conclusion that the threats to our freedoms that Boo, Atrios, Orcinus and Glen Greenwald are constantly talking about are not all that serious.
Otherwise we would be willing to use all the weapons in our arsenal. Push polling is a relatively benign weapon in that it does not permanently damage anyones fundamental rights. Plus you can easily avoid it by not answering the phone, or not taking the poll.
It’s not so easy to avoid wide scale wiretaping. It’s not so easy for a country to avoid the bombs when they start to fall.
“I would rather lose every election” means in twenty years you would probably not even have elections if the republicans get their dream world. These guys are SICK, and some of them are EVIL. You better be willing to do what it takes to repudiate them, or you will have them forever.
nalbar
If we have to become liars, cheaters and thieves to get rid of the liars, cheaters and thieves then there won’t be enough of the American ideal left for any of us to give a fuck about.
I would rather be a lier than a war criminal. And even some liers believe in the constitution.
And just so you know,
EVERY single person running for the president right now, and EVERY single person who has run for that office in my life time, is a lier.
It goes with the type of person who raises that high in politics.
I see this repeatedly on progressive sites. People talk about how bad things are and have no idea what it is going to take to reverse it. To battle it all.
If you bring a knife to a gun fight you will get shot dead. And you will deserve it.
But what about your loved ones? Do they ‘deserve’ it?
So, is it worth a million Iranian deaths so democrats don’t ‘get their hands dirty’?
I guess so.
nalbar
There are certainly days when I wish that someone had run a cheerleader and failed business leader add about Bush in 2000, it would have saved a lot of us a lot of grief. Without the benefit of hindsight, I certainly would have been annoyed in 2000 if we had done though.
I think that things like that were clearly justified in 2004 simply by the way that the Republicans were running their campaign with purple band-aids, swift boating and calling him effete. What is good for the goose is good for the gander, but lets not be the first to strike below the belt.
If Mitt’s the nominee, the Repubs will already have done the Dems dirtywork.
I thought deferments were okay if you were a Republican.
asking questions intended to plant a message in voters’ minds
asking questions intended to plant a message in voters’ minds
asking questions intended to plant a message in voters’ minds
A pavlovian dog does push the button for food once trained.
Rather than gauging people’s attitudes.
So much for representative democracy huh.
It depends on whether you think Mormonism is just a funny little religion where the people where strange underwear & have a secret handshake, or whether you think it is an aggressive, intolerant organization that makes Scientologists look like pikers.
I know many good folks that are Mormons – but I dont’ like or trust Mormonism – any more than I do Republicanism.
“push polling” isn’t the issue. the facts, and the use of them, are.
“bill clinton got a blow job, from a young woman not his wife.”
“up until very recently, this religious ideology had extremely harsh things to say about the spiritual and ultimate virtue of an entire ‘race’ of people. for no reasons but those based in wholly unscientific, mythological claims.”
“none of the romney family has served in the military.”
republicans know what to do with those statements. democrats don’t. facts are still facts, even when used by those who are evil. what, you don’t think democrats should use the phone as a campaign device? because what, republicans won’t if they don’t? in the scheme of things, a few fact based, strongly worded phone calls hardly seem dangerous or without purpose for thinking democrats.
I would prefer to see no campaign phone contact at all. That being unlikely, Democrats need to counter such Republican techniques, not duplicate them.
it’s actually kinda ironic that the company behind this anti-mormon whisper campaign is based in utah.
yeah, I thought so.
Some people are drawing the obvious conclusion.
Could Romney Be Behind the Anti-Mormon N.H. Phone Calls?