A Prediction

Hillary Clinton will win no more than 5 more primaries between now and the nominating convention.

No Torture, No Vote

From the blog of my friend Jim Johnson, I read that the National Review is withholding its endorsement from John McCain. Now, this is not only because he supports the reasonable accommodation of millions of hardworking and taxpaying residents of the US. And it's not only because he opposes tax cuts during war time. No, it's also because he does not support the US waterboarding prisoners.

For those of you who don't know, every reasonable person in the world thinks that waterboarding is a form of torture. Also for those who don't know, the National Review Online is ridiculous and unworthy of your readership. Find it for yourself, if you like.

Romney goes half way

Here are excerpts from Mitt Romney's speech tonight. They include nothing on how he justified belonging to and proselytizing for an officially racist organization. I guess he's saving that explanation for the full speech.

If you think I am being hard on Romney, you're wrong. Any man who follows a religion which believed just thirty years ago that blacks lacked souls and denied them the sacrements should be made to explain if he was at least uncomfortable with this doctrine. If his response was that it took a "revelation" to church elders to correct his view, then you have to wonder whether he'll look to similar revelations when he's in the White House.

There should be, of course, no religious test for the presidency. But we should be willing to expect a candidate to explain his adherence to a racist doctrine, just as he should be made to explain whether he believes the commandements of elders in his church take precedence over the US constitution and its laws.

Presidential Politics Get Nasty, but Maybe Not Enough

The Times Online has a nice summary story on the latest controversies in the presidential primaries. Despite the fact that the nominating conventions are still 8 or 9 months away, things are already getting nasty. Two things are going on. First, the Clinton folks are suggesting on background that they have some nasty business on Obama, but are refusing to share it. Who knows if they do. Either way it's hardball politics.

The second story is that in the last week someone was calling around Iowa doing some message testing on Mitt Romney, most of which turns on his Mormonism. The basic story is that some firm is calling households asking them, after 20 or so questions, whether they'd be more or less likely to vote for Romney for the nomination if they knew about some of the features of his relgion. Many, including Romney, have been mistakenly calling this is a "push poll". It's not. Push polls don't waste 20 questions before imparting negative information. They get right to it, because they are meant to reach several multiples more people than a poll which is message testing.

Nomenclature aside, what I think these stories are missing is a more central question. Namely, should voters be less likely to vote for Romney since he is a Mormon? Now, I for one don't really care if Romney follows the Mormon god or Zeus, but I would like him to answer the following question: Did he believe before 1978 that black males should be full participants in his church's sacrements? Because his Church certainly did not. No, they had to wait for a "revelation" before they realized that skin colour shouldn't preclude full participation. Religion is a private matter, perhaps, until it calls into question a politician's commitment to equal rights. So, let's take these questions out of polls and put them into a larger public space. I wonder which journalist will be the first to ask Romney when it dawned on him that his Church's doctrine was racist.

UPDATE: I guess this must be the reason why Romney doesn't want to talk about his religion. You don't want to give youth the idea that you could be an active leader in a church which had a fundamentally racist doctrine and then still become President.