I'm just hoping Romney is cynically pandering...

It amazes me time and time again to watch an obviously intelligent Mitt Romney continue to stumble over an obstacle like religion. With his education, obvious business acumen and his "gift" of "seamless" political tectonic plate shifting, it is stunning to watch him stumble over the "religious issue" time and time again. His speech in College Station did not clear up this issue, in fact it may have clouded it even further. Is Romney merely pandering or does he honestly believe that, "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom"? He was asked about this by Tim Russert on Meet the Press this morning:



RUSSERT: "Freedom requires religion." Can you have freedom without organized religion?


ROMNEY: Well, I was paraphrasing and underlining, if you will, a quote that I'd just read from John Adams, who said that our constitutional form of government in this nation would require morality and freedom to be able to survive. And, of course, George Washington said virtually the same thing, that we were a nation that required a level of morality and religion in order to be a great nation and survive. And I think there's truth to that, that the--that the great experiment of democracy, the experiment of America's freedom has, as its basis, a sense of morality and a recognition that religious foundations are part of that, that morality.



Romney was paraphrasing and underlining an Adams quote he had just read? What does that even mean? Does that mean his speechwriter put that in and Romney decided he liked it? Why was he just reading a quote . . . without context? Is that in the Book of Mormon? Surely he could not have read about Adams (or any of the other Founding Fathers) and walked away with the impression that they conflated religion and morality. Certainly Adams and others spoke of morality as being essential to freedom, but never did they mistake morality for religion or religiosity.

And so the point Romney made by interchanging the words morality and religion is a dangerous one for one of two reasons; either he believes it, or he is cynically pandering. It could be dismissed as a simple misstatement but he did not merely misstate Adams--he twisted Adams. Besides, it appears to me that Romney is far too intelligent to make such a dumb mistake. One could argue then that the only conclusion that makes any sense is that this is what Romney truly believes. Perhaps this is even the unspoken signal Romney intended to give the christian right-- code words that he too, like W. Bush, can speak their language. This is troublesome for Romney. Whereas Bush can come off as more believable, since he actually walks around with born-again fervor and the false, messianic confidence that his every decision is guided by Jesus, Romney looks more like a cynical panderer.

Most in the christian right DO conflate religion (theirs) with morality (also theirs). Romney was speaking language (again theirs) that he appears too educated to believe. Certainly he is too intelligent and educated to believe that this is what the Founding Fathers believed. Perhaps not though and maybe Romney's religion is a cause for concern. Perhaps he is a true believer cut from a Huckabee/Joseph Smith cloth. But looking at his past, this seems unlikely. Romney may be a fervent and devout Mormon, but more than anything, what he believes in is getting elected. Romney has made a career of cynically shifting his positions from one election to the next in order to pander to the base he needs. In Massachusetts that was the pro-choice, gay crowd and in the Republican Party in America, that is the christian right.

After almost 7 years of a true-believer in the White House, and observing the result of conflating religion and morality in other parts of the world, such conflation seems absurd and dangerously anachronistic. I have to believe that a man as obviously talented and intelligent as Romney cannot honestly be a true-believer in the idea that religion and morality are the same. I am much happier believing that Romney is merely a cynical panderer rather than a true-believer that Freedom requires religion.