The White House has said it would treat Mitt Romney’s religion as off-limits for attacks, but apparently that message hasn’t filtered down to everyone in the Democratic Party. In an article published in the Daily Beast Thursday night, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer was quoted letting loose with a slam at Romney’s Mormon origins while answering a question about GOP outreach to Hispanics:
While discussing swing states, Schweitzer said Romney would have a “tall order to position Hispanics to vote for him,” and I replied that was mildly ironic since Mitt’s father was born in Mexico, giving the clan a nominal claim to being Hispanic. 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.”
As the Beast pointed out, both Romney’s parents and grandparents were monogamous, so tying him to the polygamous practices of his great-grandparents is a nasty piece of business and no more relevant to the 2012 campaign than an investigation into the marital practices of President Obama’s ancestors in Kenya. Though Democrats will downplay Schweitzer as a nobody who ought not to be linked to Obama, imagine if a Republican governor of an equally obscure state were to make comments about Obama’s family tree. The furor would be tremendous, and the incident would be treated in the mainstream media as emblematic of GOP racism. Any effort to downplay rather than to vigorously condemn Schweitzer’s remarks are a sure sign that Democrats hope to profit from such slurs. So while you won’t hear any slurs against Mormons from the president or even his top attack dog Vice President Biden, there will be plenty of Democratic surrogates who will be working overtime this year to foul the political waters with slurs against Mormons.
