Psst, Mormons ... it's not about you

ONE GOOD RULE OF THUMB FOR punditry, damned or otherwise, goes like this: When a politician says something, exactly the opposite is true.

Like most axioms, it doesn't apply in every case. For instance, when John McCain says he doesn't know anything about the economy, he's probably more or less telling the truth. And when he says, as he did in Florida last month, that once he's president "my friends ... there's going to be other wars, I'm sorry to tell you this, there will be other wars," he can probably be believed.

On the other hand, sometimes the rule is dead-on, as was the case last week when Willard Milton Romney announced that he would stop running for president.

"If this were only about me, I'd go on," Willard said. "But it's never been only about me."

As they say in France, where Willard spent his young adulthood avoiding the draft, au contraire.

Romney's campaign was always all about him. Specifically, it was about his blazing artificiality, his transparent pandering and his blatant willingness -- even eagerness -- to adopt any position or belief or ideology if he thought there might be a political advantage to it.

Abortion. Guns. Gays. Ronald Reagan. Immigration. Taxes. Conservatism itself. If a voter didn't like Romney's stands on any of those matters, all that voter had to do was wait for a while; eventually, Romney almost certainly would have a different position.

The candidate's fatal flaw was not lost on those in the national media tasked with writing the campaign's obituaries. The candidacy "failed to overcome doubts about Mr. Romney's authenticity" (New York Times). "Conservatives weren't sure if they could trust him" (Christian Science Monitor). Summed up Newsweek's normally mild-mannered Howard Fineman: "But maybe he really is a soulless throat-cutter who would do and say anything to win."

Alas, here in the interior West, where long-suffering inferiority complexes drive the citizenry and its media to grasp for any indication no matter how slight that someone in the rest of the world cares about them one way or the other, Romney's failure as a presidential candidate was ascribed not to his striking similarity to Eddie Haskell but to that quality which he shares with so many of the region's people: Latter-day Sainthood.

To be sure, polls have shown that some Americans think Mormons are creepy. Pew Research found that 25 percent of those surveyed said they would be "less likely" to vote for a Mormon. That's higher than the 16 percent who were reluctant to vote for an evangelical Christian or the 11 percent who expressed reservations about voting for a Jew (though nowhere near the nearly half who would be less likely to vote for a Muslim or the 61 percent who would rather not vote for a non-believer).

Though focusing heavily and primarily on Romney's flip-flopping flim-flammery, many national stories on Romney's exit from the race at least mentioned religion in passing. And both Las Vegas newspapers last week cited Romney's faith as an obstacle to Romney's presidential ambitions, with the Sun devoting an entire story to the subject.

Weirdly, however, the local media, in the course of focusing on Romney's religion, failed to mention, even in passing, the candidate's bigger problem -- his full-on phony baloneyness. That blindness, or denial, may have reached a local extreme of sorts when Review-Journal columnist Erin Neff dutifully trotted out the power of Mormonism to sink a campaign and then quoted someone who, utterly deaf to irony, had supported Romney because they didn't want a candidate who "flip-flops."

The divergence of national and regional media narratives was predictably even more striking up yonder in Utah, where the early eulogies of Willard's candidacy viewed it not for what it was -- just another unsuccessful bid to win the presidency -- but as a momentous event in American history. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Romney's campaign "took the pulse" of America on Mormonism, and "forced Latter-day Saints to acknowledge that they don't just belong to another American denomination." Mormons "gamely took it on the chin" during Romney's campaign, added the Deseret Morning News.

Well. Aren't Mormons special.

They need to get over themselves.

As with any grouping of human beings convinced that a magic invisible god in the sky has revealed to them, and only them, the one superior truth about the cause and purpose of the universe, there are any number of perfectly good reasons to make fun of Mormons. There's some oddness or other having to do with a planet in a distant star system. Their guidebook says dark skin symbolizes a curse. After the second coming, the earth will be ruled from Jerusalem and Missouri, conjuring up the delightful possibility of the savior performing two shows daily at Branson on a rotating schedule with Yakof Smirnoff and Andy Williams. The list goes on.

But Moses' wizardry, immaculate conception, 73 virgins -- it's not like Mormons have cornered the market on supernatural jiggery-pokery. And really, Mormons need to give the whiny victims/oppressed peoples act a rest already. They feel put upon because they think America is looking askance at them? Please. Let's give an atheist $50 million to spend on a presidential run and watch how that plays out.

Attributing the death of Romney's campaign to anti-Mormonism might provide some perverse comfort that fortifies the Mormon sense of community. But it also obscures the main reason for Romney's failure to catch on. Why, it might even be leading Mormons who are thinking about such things to fundamentally misread what Romney's candidacy says, inasmuch as it says anything, about their particular brand of hocus-pocus.

Willard and some in his campaign seemed to believe, rightly or wrongly, that they had to convince the country that he wasn't a cult follower with 27 wives. But what about the other side of the Romney candidacy coin? That is, now that Romney has emerged as the most famous Mormon not named Osmond, do Mormons have to convince the country that they're not a bunch of hypocritical lying phonies who can't be trusted and who will say or do whatever it takes to get ahead?

Instead of wringing their hands and knitting their brows about how the country viewed Romney because of his Mormonism, maybe Mormons should worry about how the country views them because of Romney.

Hugh Jackson is a longtime local journalist, former senior editor of CityLife and the proprietor of the Las Vegas Gleaner (www.lasvegasgleaner.com), where he blogs.