The BBC's Washington correspondent asks, "Is American ready for a Mormon President?" Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, it is reported, will announce in January that he will run for President in 2008. This won't come as a surprise to many people.
But here is a big difference between Mormons and other American evangelists - Mormons do not feel threatened by science.
This nation is still dominated by the mainstream sects of the Christian faith but faith based politics is out of favour.
They are not enemies of the rational world - they are not creationists.
And on human conduct they tend to stress setting personal examples rather than getting the state to enforce religious rules.
A Mormon President would probably still be too socially conservative to please most liberal voters. On the other hand, it'd be an end to the current faith-based bushwah, and the Mormon church -- properly, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- believes in leading by example where religion is concerned, rather than in passing laws to force everybody to "Do as we do, or else." Or so says the BBC; Romney, personally, strongly backed the ill-fated Marriage Protection Act, then after Massachusetts legalized gay marriages in 1993, he resurrected the "1913 law" which bars Massachusetts non-residents from marrying in Massachusetts if the marriage would not be legal in their home state. If he couldn't stop gay Massachusetts couples from marrying in Massachusetts, then at least by god he'd stop gay couples from as many other states as he could from coming to Massachusetts to marry.
A point in his favor is that Romney is a successful businessman in his own right, unlike George W. Bush's unenviable "career" record of flying previously-sound companies into the ground. Romney, by contrast, saved Bain & Company from financial collapse, and did it without any layoffs, then went on to rescue the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics from a fiscal shortfall and allegations of bribery against the then Salt Lake Olympics Committee President and Vice-President, both of whom had been forced to resign in disgrace.
Perhaps surprisingly, coming from politically liberal Massachusetts, Romney will run as a right-wing Republican. (There's nothing strange about this for Romney; only for Massachusetts, long time stronghold of the Kennedys, though Romney fought Ted Kennedy to his narrowest victory ever for the Senate in 1994.) Amy Sullivan of Washington Monthly, though, writes that this won't satisfy Bush's evangelical power bloc -- to the narrow minds of the Christian Right, the Mormon faith isn't a Christian faith or even a proper religion at all, it's a cult. To mainstream America, Mormons are a little odd and quirky, sometimes the subject of jokes; to evangelical Christians, they're blasphemers, apostates, heretics, agents of Satan. The fundamentalists hate Mormons worse than they hate Catholics, worse even than they hate Jews. (A hatred that's oddly contradictory in itself, considering that they profess the one and only path to Heaven is to accept a two-thousand-years-dead Jew into your heart as your personal savior. Oh, but wait, we're talking the alternate history of Christian fundamentalists, in which Jesus of Nazareth was a blue-eyed, blond Aryan.)
To me, it sounds as though Romney's going to be between a rock and a hard place. If he can't please the liberals, can't please the moderates, and can't please the evangelical bloc ... then who is going to vote for him?
