One Utah

Mitt gave the best speech of his career. He actually showed the emotion he feels. This is the Mitt Romney I knew when he was a student at BYU and dad’s counselor in a Mormon ward.

Mitt’s speech is just possibly the best given by any of his Party. He speaks with a new voice of passion: where passion and politics meet. He did what he had to do. He turned Huckabee around, at least for the moment, in Iowa. And stands tall in New Hampshire, where all this religion looks like what it is, at best silly, at worst damned nasty stuff, irrelevant if not hateful.

Mitt represented his Church, and mine, as well as it’s ever been represented by a Republican. He stays alive through Iowa, takes New Hampshire, and moves with momentum into South Carolina. He’s got the money to stay in the race there, even if he doesn’t finish first. Which he just might do.

BUT…he talked to three hundred picked supporters with planned and pre-planned applause. No questions asked. None taken. He changed no minds in the immediate audience, since his public relations folks saw to it, like Karl Rove, their patron saint in Texas and the United States, would have it: it was canned. I smell Rove in the compost bully pulpit. (Cf., my comment about my grandfather speaking years ago, as chairman of the Democratic Party in Utah, from atop a manure pile, wherefrom he apologized to his audience of active Democrats for “speaking to them from atop a Republican platform…..)

John Kennedy walked into the Lion’s Den in his Texas speech. Those there viewed him as public enemy number one, and proved it a few years later, by murdering him. Kennedy also gave a great address before thousands of Mormons in the Mormon Tabernacle, with the Tabernacle Choir, and my grandfather, Hugh B. Brown, and President David O. McKay in the audience and on the stand with Jack Kennedy.

That, dear readers (all six), is that. The Evangelicals, some of them, might buy this. Mitt genuinely spoke his heart. The first such speech in which I would applaud, from heart and from his totally American substance. Mormonism, for better and for worse, is in fact, the One Totally American Church. So much for St. Paul. And St. Thomas Jefferson.

But folks, he spoke, in a sense before his Wardhouse. I don’t mean that the place was loaded with Mormons. But it was as controlled as every Mormon wardhouse speech has been, since the 1950’s, when the Birch Society bought the Mormon Church. That Cold War mentality still exists in Utah’s Mormondom. Even Mitt can’t parse that one. So………..

The polls will reflect a momentary bump up. But upon reflection, and violating Casey Stengel’s rule that we not prophecy, especially about the future, I will look into my faux-chrystal ball and bet a Confederate dollar (in the Bush Administration’s guidance of our nation’s economy, worth about three thousand Yankee dollars for every Confederate photo of Jefferson Davis) that Mitt will come to grief in the Bible Belt.

I must admit, however, that this speech was by far his best. Ever. And if he can do the same thing, spontaneously, before audiences that hate his guts, he just might go all the way. Into the Republican future as Vice President on a failing ticket, when pitted against any of the Democratic Party’s nominees. For once, at least, all of the Democrats are so far ahead of their Repubican rivals that even Utah might go Democratic. Good God! I must get some rest and settle down. Clearly, I’m hallucinating.

Ed Firmage
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

This entry was posted Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Mitt Romney, Mormon LDS, National Politics, This Blog, Utah Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.