Ignorance stands between Romney and the White House

By Nicholas Wilbur

The 2012 presidential campaign is off to a lackluster and lackadaisical start, and the Republican Party's hopes of finding a legitimate challenger to face off against Barack Obama are just as lacking.

The prospective presidential candidates who continue to top poll after poll are the same faces we saw in 2008, and they're just as polarizing, just as unpopular among the Republican leadership, and just as unelectable now as they were then. Of the top three, two are as loathed as they are loved – and that's on the right, excluding half of the electorate – while the other, though qualified, is as welcomed from within the conservative ranks as a Starbucks convention inside Provo, Utah city limits.

The Palin Factor

Taking third, just as she did in 2008 (behind Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but far ahead of John McCain) there's Sarah Palin, whose current popularity (measured separately from her "attractiveness") has fallen to bottom-feeder levels since she was chosen as vice presidential candidate in the last presidential election. Faced with lawsuits and ethics investigations during and following her entrance onto the national stage, Palin eventually abandoned her governorship in Alaska halfway through her first term in order to pursue a career as a political celebrity, signing on first with Fox News, then launching a reality TV series with TLC.

The formerly unknown "Mama Grizzly" traded in state stewardship to become a Facebook and Twitter icon – amassing 10 times more followers than real Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner combined. She gave up public service to become a millionaire and a celebrity, effectively erasing whatever fantastical images America may have had of her as being a rogue reformer of the Wild Wild West.

The continuous publicity, needless to say, hasn't quelled any of the skepticism surrounding Palin when McCain introduced her as his presidential running mate. She's still an amateur when it comes to domestic and international policy, she still refuses to grant interviews to anyone in the press who isn't a host at Fox, and she still looks like a dunce in the eyes of any crowd that isn't handpicked from the Tea Party pool of like-minded fanatics. She is extremely popular among the Birthers – those who believe President Obama is a Manchurian Candidate who wasn't born in the United States, and therefore isn't legally entitled to be president – but conspiracy theorist fringe groups don't decide the outcome of national elections, a reality to which the Republican Party is privy.

A "Palin for President" campaign, of course, assumes she would even run. More likely, she's milking a potential White House campaign as a publicity stunt to boost her image, sell some books, and earn a few high-paying speaking tours throughout the Bible Belt. Palin has as much chance at beating Obama in the general election as Fox News has of earning a Nobel Prize for ethics. She knows this as well as anyone. Even if Palin managed to pull off a few primary victories in 2012, conservatives wouldn't dare hand her the country. The Republican Party may be stuffed full of power-hungry demagogues, but they're not politically suicidal.

Nobody Hearts Huckabee

Then there's Mike Huckabee, the Southern Baptist minister and former governor of Arkansas, who is utterly incapable of attracting more than a few thousand viewers to his Fox News show, let alone to a campaign rally. Though he may top Rupert Murdoch's list of  presidential hopefuls, Huckabee couldn't rile a pack of wolves with a truckload of filet mignon, which makes him about as plausible a candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination as House of the Dead is of being inducted into the cinema hall of fame.

The Fringe Revolutionary

The Republican Party's wild card, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), continually fails to reach double-digit ratings in national polls, but his supporters show up en masse every year to give him strong presence at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. He is popular among the young and overzealous libertarians but is largely ignored by the media, mainly because his staunchly held ideological beliefs make him incapable of striking a balance between idealism and pragmatism.

After Paul's failed presidential bid in 2008, his status was reduced to author of revolutionary manifestos ("The Revolution: A Manifesto"), and it fell even further when his son Rand ran successfully for Congress in 2010 as a representative of the Tea Party.

The... Mormon

That leaves Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.

Romney may be the only potential candidate capable of overcoming the triple-dose of fiscal retardation under Reagan and the two Bushes, but he'll fail to make the cut nonetheless, and for the same reasons he was overlooked as a running mate for McCain in 2008: he's Mormon.

Romney is a successful businessman, he's rich, he's more than adept at pulling in campaign donors, he's on point with the core beliefs of conservatism, and he's chock-full of family values – even without having multiple wives.

But therein lies the problem.

No matter how good he looks on paper, no matter how good he looks in the paper – what with his chiseled, "rugged jawline" and his thick Massachusetts mop, which has "gone gray in just the right places" – Romney can't ditch his faith.

Much like the closeted discrimination surrounding Obama's race, Romney's religion, whether admitted to or not, is a drawback that many voters – particularly those within the Republican Party's base – will not be able to overlook. It may be a pock mark on the face of a country that prides itself in diversity and freedom of religion, but his faith nonetheless disqualifies him from office.

In the minds of the American masses, Mormonism is not synonymous with Christianity, and no resemblances between the two will convince conservative voters otherwise. Islam and Christianity share the same God, their followers believe in many of the same prophets, and their leaders preach many of the same sermons, but that doesn't stop the majority of Christians from viewing Islam as the religion of extremist terrorists who hate American freedom and live only to die as martyrs for the anti-American cause. The same rationale, however misguided, will be applied to Mormonism, and to Romney.

To the uninformed, Mormonism is nothing more than a polygamist cult full of pedophiles who marry their teenage cousins, live in isolated desert compounds, and panhandle on street corners in order to fund their way of life.

If not for Romney's established reputation as a successful business man and a respected (though not loved) Republican governor, and if not for fellow Mormon Glenn Beck's popularity among radical fringe groups, the Tea Party already would have lumped Mormonism in with socialism, Communism, fascism, and every other allegedly occult and arguably unconstitutional movement they claim is trying to unravel the patriotic thread that's keeping America tied together.

With an albatross as weighty as Mormonism hanging from his neck, Romney won't be an easy candidate to support, particularly among the ever-more staunchly conservative Christian base of the Republican Party.

If Romney is nominated, he couldn't win the election without dedicating the majority of his year-long campaign to self-defense, explaining to the American people exactly what Mormonism represents and allaying the media-induced fears about incest, polygamy, and the 18th-century roles of women within the church. Such an education lesson would assuage many fears and elevate many voters from the troughs of ignorance, but it wouldn't do a thing to boot Obama out of the White House.

As the primaries approach, the GOP will sit back and hope (and pray, of course) that Romney eventually drops out. After he starts winning primary races in key states, which he will, the GOP will stand up and demand that he drop out.

America showed it was ready to make history by electing a black president in 2008, but the voters who put Barack Obama in the White House were predominantly Democrats.

To expect conservative Christians to elevate the country's first Mormon to such a powerful position will take an act of God, and not even the Republican Party believes America is ready to make such a historic stride on Election Day 2012.

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)