Is Team Obama’s Mitt Romney ‘Weirdness’ Narrative Really Code For ‘Mormon?’
According to a new Politico piece, President Obama’s reelection team are zeroing in on Mitt Romney as the guy they’ll most likely have to beat come next November, and in interviewing about a dozen Obama advisers, the common narrative thread was Romney’s “weirdness.”
When you consider some of the attacks against then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008, it’s more than a little ironic that some are asking if this “weirdness” meme is a coded reference to Romney’s Mormon faith.
In fact, the ironies abound in Politico’s piece about Team Obama’s burgeoning strategy against the presumptive favorite. It should be encouraging to Democrats that they’re reviewing the 2004 game films to see how George W. Bush defeated John Kerry, although they’d be well-served to also go over Kerry’s campaign to make sure they do none of that.
It’s the “weirdness” theme that stands out, though. Politico’s Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin describe how it emerged:
The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”
Whenever I conduct multiple interviews, and that kind of similarity emerges, I take notice. Although the piece cites non-religious reasons for the theme (strapping his dog to the roof of his car, making weird jokes about unemployment and ass-grabbing), there was also a reference by senior adviser David Axelrod saying that “Presidential campaigns are like MRIs of the soul,” and Romney’s Mormonism became such an issue in 2008 that he was compelled to give a speech about it.
Of course, in that same campaign, another candidate’s religion became the subject of attacks that persist to this day, as 18% of Americans are still convinced that President Obama is a secret Muslim. If “weird” is code for “Mormon” (which it might well be), it’s a hell of a lot more subtle than the attacks that were leveled at Obama, including by Romney in his 2008 concession speech.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, and if, as the campaign wears on, the attacks on Romney’s religion come into focus, that’ll hurt Obama’s campaign. It’s going to be a long primary fight, though, and something tells me that Team Obama won’t have to draw from this well.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
