Romney's Final Speech?

Tomorrow, at the George H.W. Bush Library at Texas A&M University, Mitt Romney will deliver the speech of his life. He will appeal to the fairness of Americans and ask them not to allow his Mormonism to influence their decision on whether to vote for him in the Republican primaries.

It is a speech he had been hoping to put off, but the nature of the campaign in Iowa, the importance of religion to voters, and the rise of Mike Huckabee, who has, according to polls, attracted almost half of the Christian voters in Iowa, has forced his hand.

John F. Kennedy gave a similar address in Houston, Texas, during his 1960 presidential run after voters in the state and elsewhere let it be known that they were unhappy that his Catholicism might guide his decisions as president. The antipathy toward Catholics in American public life is rooted in the experience of the earliest protestant settlers who had escaped Catholic persecution in Europe. By the mid 20th century anti-Catholic sentiment still lingered.

Anti-Catholic fervor has also played a significant part in the history of New York. When Alfred Emanuel Smith, an Irish Catholic governor of the state, became the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928, a Methodist bishop, Adna Leonard, boomed, "No governor can kiss the papal ring and get within gunshot of the White House."

The Christian Century thundered that it could not "look with unconcern upon the seating of a representative of an alien culture, of a medieval, Latin mentality, of an undemocratic hierarchy, and of a foreign potentate in the great office of the President of the United States."

Mr. Romney does not face the problem Kennedy had to confront and he has been careful to downplay comparisons. As a Massachusetts governor, he well knows the power of lingering public affection for the late president.

He certainly does not want to find himself in the same predicament as Dan Quayle, who rashly compared himself to a young Jack Kennedy in the 1988 vice-presidential debate. Lloyd Bentsen's damning put down — "I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" — ensures that even today comparisons with Kennedy are best avoided.

What Kennedy made clear to the electorate in Texas was that he believed in the clear division of church and state and that a president must rule not from his own conscience but by judging the national interest. "If the time should ever come … when my office would require me to either violate my conscience, or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office," Kennedy declared.

But Messrs. Romney and Huckabee are not concerned about keeping church and state apart. On the contrary, both suggest that a strong faith is an essential prerequisite for the top job.

Mr. Huckabee has been running in Iowa as the sole true Christian candidate and even has taken to lacing his interviews with the teachings of Christ. His supporters, meanwhile, have been raising doubts about Mr. Romney's Mormonism.

Asked to explain why he was enjoying a surge in support with such meager resources, Mr. Huckabee invoked one of Christ's miracles. "Feeding five thousand people with two fish and five loaves," he said, adding, for those who did not grasp the import of the allusion, that there was "no human explanation for some of what's happened."

Later, he compared the primary process to the search for King David. "It's almost like when the prophet was looking for a king. He came down, looked through all of Jesse's sons … and said, 'Is this all you got?' Jesse said, 'Well, I got this one kid over here, he's kind of a ne'er do well … everybody thinks [he has] got the best shot. [The prophet] said, 'Well let me check him out,' and that was the one that ended up getting the nod."

Comparing yourself in the same gasp to both Christ and King David, and implying that you are somehow both the Chosen One and a giant killer, is an audacious, some would say sacrilegious, gambit, but it appears to be paying off. The latest Iowa poll by the Des Moines Register suggests Mr. Huckabee is now the clear leader, ahead of former frontrunner Mr. Romney by five points.

To halt the Huckabee tide, Mr. Romney needs to address the elements of Mormonism which make traditional Christians uncomfortable and is causing them to turn to a self advertised "Christian leader" and ordained Baptist minister. But there will be little in Mr. Romney's speech tomorrow to put traditional Christians straight about what Mormons consider to be the third book of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, first published in Palmyra, N.Y., in 1830.

Nor will we hear much about the Mormon practice of baptizing the dead, including Jewish Holocaust survivors. We shall hear nothing about polygamy, outlawed by Mormons in 1890, but still practiced by fundamentalist Mormons today. There will be no reference to the historical exclusion of African-Americans from the priesthood, a bar which was lifted only in 1978.

Instead, it seems, Mr. Romney will rely upon paradoxical logic. He will claim that a candidate should not be judged on his faith, but at the same time he will argue that, in contradiction to John Kennedy's appeal to secularism, religious morality should play a more important part in public life.

He hinted as much this week in Manchester, N.H. "I'm concerned that faith has disappeared in many respects from the public square. I want to make sure that we maintain our religious heritage in this country — not of a particular brand of faith, if you will, not a particular sect or denomination, but rather the great moral heritage that we have," he said.

Mr. Romney's dilemma is that to explain his lifelong adherence to Mormonism would prove to be every bit as unpopular as not explaining his devotion to Mormonism. Yet he must somehow defuse Christianity as the issue driving Iowa voters into Mr. Huckabee's fold.

The keynote speech tomorrow is not only the most important of Mr. Romney's life, it may well prove to be his last.

nwapshott@nysun.com

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Correction: Houston is where John F. Kennedy gave his 1960 address on religion. An earlier version of this story misstated the site of the speech.

Correction from December 6, 2007: Houston is where John F. Kennedy gave his 1960 address on religion. The site of the speech was misstated in a column on page 8 of yesterday's New York Sun.