Poly Wanna Cracker? Another attack on Romney predictably backfires.

Poly Wanna Cracker? Another attack on Romney predictably backfires.

• By JAMES TARANTO 

Associated Press

Gov. Schweitzer: "kinda ironic."

Another day, another effort by an Obama supporter to portray Mitt Romney as weird. This time it's Brian Schweitzer, governor of Montana, in an interview with the Daily Beast. When Schweitzer "said Romney would have a 'tall order to position Hispanics to vote for him,' " reporter Ben Jacobs observed "that was mildly ironic since Mitt's father"--George W. Romney, who served as Michigan's governor from 1963-69 and sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1968--"was born in Mexico":

Schweitzer replied that it is "kinda ironic given that his family came from a polygamy commune in Mexico, but then he'd have to talk about his family coming from a polygamy commune in Mexico, given the gender discrepancy." Women, he said, are "not great fans of polygamy, 86 percent were not great fans of polygamy. I am not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle, but his father was born into [a] polygamy commune in Mexico.

Schweitzer's claim is factually accurate. As Jacobs notes, the elder Gov. Romney "was born in Mexico in 1907 to a family of American Mormons who fled to Mexico when the United States government cracked down on the practice of polygamy." The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had already renounced polygamy (in 1890), but some Mormons still practiced it in Mexico.

Mitt Romney's grandparents, Gaskell and Anna Romney, however, were not among them. They wed in 1895, and it was the only marriage for each of them. You have to go back three generations, to Gaskell's father, Miles Park Romney (1843-1904), to find a polygamous ancestor of Mitt Romney.

To be sure, that's still unusual. Most of Western civilization rejected polygamy centuries ago, so that very few non-Mormon Americans are of such recent polygamous descent. But we can think of one major exception among prominent U.S. politicians: a powerful officeholder whose very father was a polygamist:

[Barack] Obama's father, who apparently converted to Catholicism while attending a Roman Catholic school, was also polygamous in keeping with local custom, taking an informal Kenyan wife who preceded Obama's mother but remained a consort, according to accounts by local people and the senator himself.

That quote comes from that right-wing birther maniac Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who visited Obama Sr.'s childhood village of Kogelo, Kenya, in December 2008. Kristof fretted:

Frankly, I worry that enemies of Obama will seize upon details like his grandfather's Islamic faith or his father's polygamy to portray him as an alien or a threat to American values. But snobbishness and paranoia ill-become a nation of immigrants, where one of our truest values is to judge people by their own merits, not their pedigrees.

Not to mention the pedigrees of their supper! Which is actually very much a related point. The Obama campaign and its surrogates have shown an amazing inability to anticipate the ways in which their attacks on Romney backfire against their own man.

First they claimed Republicans were waging a "war on women," which seemed to be working for them until Democratic superstar Hilary Rosen declared her contempt for women who spend their lives raising children at the expense of more elevated pursuits like flacking for the record industry and BP.

Then the effort to shame Romney over his unusual treatment of a family pet went to the dogs when Obama turned out to have a canine tooth, and we don't mean his cuspids. As a result, otherwise unrelated stories have become occasions for laughter at the president's expense.

CBS News reports that Greg Stokes, one of the agents fired in the Colombia prostitution scandal, "was recently listed on the internet as the supervisor of the Canine Training Section of the Secret Service." We hear they once asked Stokes to double as the president's food taster, but he had to turn down the assignment because it would be a conflict of interest.

 

Another Mormon-related question we expect Obama supporters to raise is the LDS church's unfortunate record vis-à-vis race. The church did not permit the ordination of blacks as priests until 1978--which sounds shocking, but perhaps less so when you reflect it was only 14 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But Obama's in the clear here, right? It's not as if he ever belonged to a church with out-of-the-mainstream views on race. Yeah, Wright . . .

Charges of racism have already been flying fast and furious. Yesterday Romney visited a shuttered factory in Ohio and unveiled a new slogan, "Obama Isn't Working." Mediaite's Tommy Christopher finds this "evocative of a nasty racial stereotype about black men": "Just to be sure it wasn't just me, though, I asked several friends about the banner, and four out of four pointed out, unprompted, the stereotype of the 'lazy,' 'shiftless' black man."

OK, so when Tommy Christopher and his friends hear "isn't working," they immediately associate the phrase with--in Christopher's words--"the 'lazy,' 'shiftless' black man." That's quite a confession, but you can hardly blame Romney for Christopher's invidious associations.

If Obama's supporters are going to bring up imaginary racial antipathy on Romney's part, there is ample real Obama material with which the Romney campaign can strike back. Here's a passage from the second paragraph of the first chapter of "Dreams From My Father," in which Obama describes his life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at age 21 (circa 1982):

When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and study the dusk washing blue over the city, or watch white people from the better neighborhoods nearby walk their dogs down our block to let the animals [defecate] on our curbs--"Scoop the poop, you bastards!" my roommate would shout with impressive rage, and we'd laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed.

We're entirely sympathetic with the young Obama's vigilance about the neighborhood's quality of life. But what does it tell you about him that in writing this story years later, when he was in his 30s, he made it specifically about "white people"?

The truth is that Romney and Obama are both products of distinctively American subcultures--respectively, the Mormon church and the academic left. The difference is that whereas the Mormons, for more than a century, have aspired to join the American mainstream, the academic left is aggressively adversarial. It's true that there is much about Mormonism that seems odd to people of other faiths. But a contest over whose opponent is weirder is one Obama cannot possibly win.
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