Mitt’s Muffled Soul
By FRANK BRUNI
NYT
LAST week he did it again, wading into a discussion of money — or, rather, of the “very poor” who lack it — and succumbing to yet another pink slip of the tongue. Mitt Romney is forever being tripped up this election cycle by the topic of wealth.
Not, interestingly, religion. That was the angst last time around, and the extent to which the dynamic has changed, with mammon supplanting Mormon as the bejeweled albatross around his neck, was reflected in another recent comment of his, one that prompted less notice and was interpreted in a particular and highly revealing way.
At one of the debates just before the Florida primary, as he and Newt Gingrich jousted over the Latino vote, he answered Gingrich’s charges that he was anti-immigrant by calling them “repulsive” and declaiming, “My father was born in Mexico.” Many news reports mentioned the moment, casting it as an example of his newfound readiness to take the fight back to Gingrich.
But only a few of those reports recognized what an odd line of defense Romney had employed, given why his father was born there. The family lived south of the border because Miles Park Romney, Mitt’s great-grandfather, had fled the United States after the passage of an 1882 law that explicitly banned polygamy, which he practiced. He was reputedly instructed to till a polygamous Mormon colony on foreign soil.
(More here.)
NYT
LAST week he did it again, wading into a discussion of money — or, rather, of the “very poor” who lack it — and succumbing to yet another pink slip of the tongue. Mitt Romney is forever being tripped up this election cycle by the topic of wealth.
Not, interestingly, religion. That was the angst last time around, and the extent to which the dynamic has changed, with mammon supplanting Mormon as the bejeweled albatross around his neck, was reflected in another recent comment of his, one that prompted less notice and was interpreted in a particular and highly revealing way.
At one of the debates just before the Florida primary, as he and Newt Gingrich jousted over the Latino vote, he answered Gingrich’s charges that he was anti-immigrant by calling them “repulsive” and declaiming, “My father was born in Mexico.” Many news reports mentioned the moment, casting it as an example of his newfound readiness to take the fight back to Gingrich.
But only a few of those reports recognized what an odd line of defense Romney had employed, given why his father was born there. The family lived south of the border because Miles Park Romney, Mitt’s great-grandfather, had fled the United States after the passage of an 1882 law that explicitly banned polygamy, which he practiced. He was reputedly instructed to till a polygamous Mormon colony on foreign soil.
(More here.)
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