‘Mormon Moment’ Marked By Mischief And Meanness | Cognoscenti

‘Mormon Moment’ Marked By Mischief And Meanness | Cognoscenti

MISCHIEF AND MEANNESS MARS MITT'S MORMON MOMENT

 

A calculating editor ducks excommunication for now.
Church decision seems to reprove vigilantes.

Boston, Massachusetts
September 29, 2012

By R.B. Scott

NOTE:  Scott is a regular contributor to the online Cognoscenti group at at WBUR Radio, Boston public radio where a version of this column was published late Friday.
http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2012/09/28/mormonthink-r-b-scott


Although he was a co-creator of the “Mormon Moment,” Mitt Romney may be relieved when it blessedly ends along with the incessant guilt-by-association “gotchas” that have dogged him since he first ran for public office in 1994.

Here’s the most recent case in point.

A few weeks ago David Twede, the unpaid editor of MormonThink, a blog that challenges conventional church teachings and management, was invited to an ecclesiastical hearing scheduled for this Sunday that would have determined whether or not he was guilty of heresy.
On Wednesday of this week, Twede says the church abruptly and without much explanation – beyond “scheduling conflicts” – notified him that the hearing had been postponed indefinitely.

Should the “disciplinary council” be reconvened, or not, it would appear to be of little or no consequence to Twede. Although his family has been anchored to the Mormon religion and culture for nearly two centuries, Twede proclaims himself an atheist who rejects the fundamental tenets and historical claims of Mormonism. Detractors say he is a man on a mission to lead believers away from the church
Here comes the back story.

Shortly after he became editor of MormonThink a few months ago, Twede figured an editor in good standing with the church would enhance the blog’s credibility. So, he started attending worship services for the first time in five years. No sooner had he come back to the church than he began sharing unnerving historical information with faithful Mormons he met in Sunday School and boasting about it on line. That’s where Scott Gordon spotted it and overreacted.

Gordon, a former bishop of a Mormon ward, is president of the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (FAIR), a self-appointed watchdog association that over the years has waged a running battle with non-doctrinaire Mormon writers and academics.

Gordon responded by dashing off damning e-mails about Twede to several friends -- "well-placed employees not ecclesiastical leaders," he said -- at church headquarters in Salt Lake City. Within days, Gordon’s complaints were forwarded from headquarters to Allan Pratt, a physician who also serves as the president of the Mormon stake (a stake is the equivalent of a Catholic diocese) near where Twede lives in Florida. Meantime at least three other FAIR operatives made it difficult for Twede to cover his tracks, attacked his character on line, and challenged the objectivity and the accuracy of his work

Is Gordon ashamed that he outed Twede before confronting him personally, the process taught in Mormon Sunday School? “Absolutely not,” he said in a phone interview from his home in California. “Would I invite someone into my house just so they could return and rob it? Twede was going to church to lead people out.”

This story would be of interest only to the parties involved were it not for the coincidence that Twede’s initial meeting with Pratt came shortly after MormonThink published two of Twede bylined articles, one chronicling church involvement in politics, the other laying out what Mitt Romney’s sworn allegiances to the church might mean for America. While Twede initially thought his current problems with the church were not linked to presidential politics, he seems to change his mind hourly.

Twede shared his story with Steve Benson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Arizona Republic who resigned from the church and became a zealous critic. Convinced that publicity might save Twede from excommunication, Benson drafted a press release that he shared with journalists.

“I don’t feel happy that discussions of my pending discipline have taken on such a national political tone,” Twede demurred disingenuously about the mixed attention he got from the national media – including a circumspect front page report in the New York Times — and the Mormon “blogosphere.”

In an email this week, Michael Otterson, head of public affairs for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, summarily dismissed suggestions the church would discipline anyone for his politics or religious doubts. “However,” he wrote, “all organizations, religious and secular, must be able to define where the boundaries begin and end.”

For now, those borders remain ambiguous. However, the church’s decision to delay the hearing may suggest that it is finally wearying of vigilantes, whose misbegotten efforts often begin to look like witch hunts.

For his part, David Twede seems to be trolling obsessively for an official slap down and the fleeting limelight of martyrdom.

Emboldened that the church seemed to have blinked, this week he mounted his personal soapbox –- A Paisley Peristroika — and thundered: “Plenty of members are secretly sick inside when thinking about the direction MormonCo heads… the corporate takeover of their religion.”

Twede’s harangue continued in a private e-mail to me: “I now call on members to help reform the church and take it back to being a charity with love and acceptance, rather than an oppressive empire building corporation.”

 

WBUR's EDITOR’S NOTE:
R.B. Scott is a lifelong Mormon, whose ancestral roots run back to the founding of the church and its leading theologians. He has written critically about Romney and Mormonism for decades.   

ADDITIONAL COPY DELETED BECAUSE OF SPACE LIMITATIONS:

“People go to church to worship … not because they expect equal time for the opposition,” wrote Greg Prince, a Mormon from Minneapolis who peruses MormonThink regularly. “David is basically an atheist, but started attending [church] again for the marketing advantage, so to speak... The timing is unfortunate given the Romney postings, but his behavior doesn't strike me as particularly ethical.”

Posting to “Recovery from Mormonism,” another site frequented by critics and former members, a subscriber identified as “Moremoney” wrote: “Were they [the church] also "inspired" to shoot themselves in the foot like this, during the "Mormon Moment", in a swing state to boot? “

 

 

    

   

FOR PANDERER-IN-CHIEF?

It's Mitt in a landslide

By R.B. Scott
Boston, Massachusetts
September 24, 2012

 

Should Mitt Romney’s once disciplined assault on President Barack Obama fall short, as now seems likely, historians and political analysts will note that he sowed the seeds of self-destruction months, perhaps even years ago.  His chronic Bain panderbabble and haughty presumption that he is accountable only to Ann are dragging him down, down, down.  Again!

             He chose the aftermath of a deadly attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya to launch a broadside on President Obama’s Middle East strategy.  A few days later a videotaped record surfaced of his off-the-cuff spiel at a private gathering of fat cat donors.  His condescension toward the hoi polloi supporters of President Obama offended at least half of the nation and caused the other half to wonder if there was ever an empathetic sinew in Mitt’s body, let alone a bone.  He didn’t mean to put it quite the way it tumbled out of his mouth, which is how he rudely upstaged the Olympic Games in London earlier in the summer, challenging security readiness and the city’s paucity of community spirit.  

Then in the walkup to a meeting with Latinos where he intended to mend fences over an ill-considered wisecrack that he would be better off in this election had he been born Mexican -- a novelist would get panned if he made-up this stuff --  he dyed his face brown, but missed his ears.  Really!   

Goodnight Irene!

 It’s beginning to feel a lot like 1994 all over again. Recall that September was the month Romney fully squandered his surprising lead over Senator Edward Kennedy.  He had refused to define himself then and, when the tough got going, his responses to attacks on his character and religion were late an impotent.  And, he’s doing it again.  At this point in the ’94 campaign Ann Romney was calling out critics of her beleaguered man like she was last week. “Stop it” she whimpered in a Radio Iowa interview. “This is hard. You want to try it? “ 

Goodnight, Ann!  

It is 2012.  Your husband wants us make him the most powerful man on Planet Earth, a job he has pursued since he was a teenager.  I get Team Romney’s mailings.  They seem to arrive hourly.  They are not very nice to Michelle’s husband.  Barry is a nice fellow, an American success story too. Their daughters are adorable. Has your husband no respect for the office of the president or for family values? 

Long before the New Hampshire primary Team Obama recognized that Romney was the man to beat. So did savvy journalists.  One of the savvier, a senior political correspondent for a major national news organization asked if I thought Romney was steeled for a year of relentless “getting to know all about you” scrutiny.    

 “They think they can control it, but you and I know they can’t,” I said. My response was based on observations of him and his operatives over twenty years. From the outset, Mitt, the man accountable to no one but Ann and possibly God, believed he could limit access to information about himself, his family, his business dealings, and his religion. 

With the exception of 2002, when he was elected governor almost by acclamation, his failures to preemptively define himself and share information have led to gotchas that undercut his chances for the Senate in 1994, and his party’s nomination for president in 2008.  Romney’s need to control everything and his failure to do it are undoing him again in 2012.  

Kasie Hunt, the Associated Press reporter on the Romney jet, observed that he runs the campaign like a consultant: “He reviews TV ads and polling data on an iPad. He writes many of his speeches. He’s often talking like a consultant… The nominee simply is taking on too many duties.”

             These are egocentric attributes he honed as a church leader, a Bain executive, Olympic rescuer, governor and political candidate.  While he is quick to assign responsibility for key decisions to Ann, or an unnamed political advisor, or his son (when illegal immigrant gardeners were discovered working for him in Massachusetts), it has become clear that they are but useful props, like the wooden Charlie McCarthy was for the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.  

When his nephew Tim Robinson set-out to write a somewhat objective “third person”  account about his uncle’s “rescue” of the Salt Lake Olympics (Turnaround:  Crisis, Leadership and The Olympic Games),  Mitt took over the project himself, relegating his worshipful young relative to an inside the cover “as told to” byline.  The autobiography was so loaded with the “I” and “me” pronouns and podgy self-absorbed recollections that Robert Garff, the unassuming chairman of the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee and former president of the Utah Senate to whom Romney reported, refused to read it because of what he learned from others:  “Mitt remembers it [The Games] differently than I did,” Garff said.  “He was running for president from the beginning. He did not like reporting to the board. People like Mitt don’t like being accountable to anyone.”   It is a pattern he would follow when it came time to produce his second book, No Apology: hire the writer, fire the writer, take over the project.

He seems to have bought into a cynical adman strategy that repetition makes truth, no matter how absurd the claim.  When he learned that he could not possibly have seen his father marching side-by-side with Martin Luther King because it never happened, he went out of his way to insist that it might have happened or could have happened and stuck to the line for weeks until the controversy just faded away. 

He was aggressively adamant that he hadn’t used the F-word on a young traffic warden at the Salt Lake Olympics even though a State Highway Patrolman had witnessed Mitt’s roadside temper tantrum and F-slinging.  And for nearly two decades he has coyly refused to admit that he indeed was the young, eager Mormon bishop who gave a troubled, sick and pregnant mother bum advice about abortion.  When the damning video tape emerged last week, he accused the taper of violating Florida law, as if that was a credible defense against his haughty attacks on Obama supporters.

Instead of his father’s passionate honesty –  his stormy departure from the co-opted Republican Convention of 1964 and his famous “I was given a real brainwashing about Viet Nam” broadside in 1967— Mitt has given Americans an unchained medley of double speak, flip-flops, and pandering.  Late in the ’94 campaign to unseat Senator Kennedy, when all hope was lost, he gratuitously endorsed the Wampanoag tribe’s quest to build a gambling casino in New Bedford (Massachusetts). Is there a former Mormon stake president anywhere in America who endorses gambling, let alone casinos?  Was the endorsement sincere or a blatant suck-up?

  Routinely Romney cavalierly dismissed thoughtful counsel that character, sincerity and accomplishment matter more than slick promises tailored to appeal to the audience of the hour. His advisors think otherwise, he argues, which, of course, means he thinks otherwise.

Instead of choosing a moderate running mate known for building coalitions with Democrats, he and Beth Myers, the acutely acquiescent aide who provided cover for vice presidential search, put their heads together and came up with a choice they knew would mollify the demanding far right wing of his party.

Were Romney running for Panderer-in-Chief he might win in a landslide, were it not for the fact that his pledges have proven to be as dishonest  a salesman’s at  “Kleen Kars.”

Has Romney proven himself to be the strongest ally the gay community could find, as he promised in 1994 and again in 2002? Does he or does he not think all citizens should have health care protection as he argued in 2003?  Was his support for Roe v. Wade and “Choice” in 1994 and again 2002 and opposition now sincere or just politically expedient?  Would he really dismantle Obamacare on day one of his administration, as promised?  Or, was that pledge just more hot air?

Yet,  despite his well-established pattern of pandering, ill-timed statements about Libya, a dismissive ramble about commoners, and a bad “Dye-and-Shine” face job,  recent daily polling data give President Obama an unsteady lead (within the margin-of-error) nationally. Why?  Other data indicates that upwards of 65 percent of the nation believes the Federal government must dramatically reduce entitlements and services.  President Obama owns that problem.

There are no easy fixes to the nation’s ills.  Tough times are with us and lie ahead.  Meanness is running chin deep and rising.  In unsettling times like these people turn to empathetic leaders who seem to “have their backs,” a senior Bain colleague of Romney’s observed not long ago.  “Mitt was able to manage the Salt Lake Olympic crisis with more competence than empathy, but Rudy Giuliani is the model for how to develop trust in times of crisis.”

Apart from the fact that he has been married only once, Mitt Romney has not yet become the latter-day incarnation of the buoyant and indomitable former mayor of the nation’s most ungovernable metropolis. Don’t expect miracles between now and November 6^th.

 

 

MITT ROMNEY HOOKED BY RELIGION

Is the Mormon Church finally ready to apologize for excluding blacks
from the priesthood for more than a hundred years?

By R.B. Scott

Boston, Massachusetts

September 16, 2012

EDITOR'S NOTE:  A condensed version of this column appeared  in The Salt Lake Tribune today

Here’s how to turn a gathering “love thy neighbor” Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) mean and nasty. Tell them that the former church teaching that once prevented men of African descent from obtaining the priesthood was not revealed by God. Or, vice versa. Equal numbers seem to support these opposing propositions. Passionately.  So, be prepared to duck!

However, until recently many in both camps seemed to agree about one thing: the church need not apologize now for a practice it officially abandoned in 1978. That thinking is changing as this year’s presidential docudrama turns more racial. W. Mitt Romney, the challenger, is a faithful Latter-day Saint who was once a fairly prominent regional leader of the church in Massachusetts during the time when the exclusionary practice was taught as doctrine. If his church doesn’t set the record straight soon, it could introduce another troubling gotcha to this increasingly divisive presidential election season. Such an unfortunate turn would unnecessarily tarnish the Romney family’s legacy in civil rights. Although George Romney, like his son Mitt, likely once gave tacit support to the teaching when he served as a bishop and stake president, George’s civil rights record as governor of Michigan was passionate and aggressive. He did not march with Martin Luther King, as Mitt once claimed, but he could have.  

Here’s a compressed history.

On August 17, 1949, just two years after Lenore Romney gave birth to her “miracle” youngest child-who-would-be-president, the highest governing priesthood quorum of her church – The First Presidency-- officially reaffirmed that about a hundred years earlier the Lord had specifically revealed that men of African heritage were to be excluded from the priesthood of God.  The statement proclaimed in part:

"The attitude of the Church with reference to Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the priesthood at the present time. The prophets of the Lord have made several statements as to the operation of the principle. President Brigham Young said: "Why are so many of the inhabitants of the earth cursed with a skin of blackness? It comes in consequence of their fathers rejecting the power of the holy priesthood, and the law of God. They will go down to death. And when all the rest of the children have received their blessings in the holy priesthood, then that curse will be removed from the seed of Cain, and they will then come up and possess the priesthood, and receive all the blessings which we now are entitled to."

The rub is this: despite the fact that Mormons are obsessive record keepers, there is no record of the alleged initial “commandment” or “revelation.” Today most historians within and without the church who have researched this issue conclude the practice began under Brigham Young in Salt Lake City years after church founder Joseph Smith was murdered in Carthage, Illinois.

An abridged version of the 1949 statement was “grudgingly reaffirmed” in 1969 shortly after Mitt returned home from 30 months of full-time missionary service in France.  Strangely, the 1969 reaffirmation came long after church had begun carefully laying the groundwork for the “revelation” of 1978 that abruptly ended the  140-year-old (depending on who’s counting) controversial practice.

Mitt tells us that he was relieved and wept openly when the policy was finally terminated in 1978.  Yet, he offers no insights into where he stood personally between 1965 when he was missionary leader in France, later church leader in Massachusetts, and that “happy day” in 1978.

 A formal, reasonably explicit apology from the church would obviate the need for Mitt to explain his approach prior 1978.  It would free him to correctly attribute the policy to the misguided acts of men who were the byproducts of their times. This is what many Mormons of Mitt’s generation and younger have long believed.

For years the church has been edging steadily, if haltingly, toward a formal renunciation and unambiguous apology. Bruce R. McConkie, an outspoken church apostle who once proclaimed that Negroes would not be given the priesthood in this life, seemed to dramatically backtrack after the 1978 decision advising Mormons to “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon [another prominent early Mormon leader]  or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding…” 

Yet, a few months later the updated version of his seminal treatise “Mormon Doctrine,” first published in 1958 and self-described as "the first major attempt to digest, explain, and analyze all of the important doctrines of the kingdom…the first extensive compendium of the whole gospel, the first attempt to publish an encyclopedic commentary covering the whole field of revealed religion," McConkie retained the bulk of his embarrassingly racist claims. Inexplicably, the church continued to distribute the book, its disturbingly racist comments intact, through Deseret Book, the church’s wholly owned book publishing company until 2010, as became clear Romney was his party’s leading candidate for president. 

In a 1996 free-wheeling interview with CBS 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace, the late Mormon prophet Gordon B. Hinckley attributed the abandoned policy to the way early church leaders misinterpreted the scriptures. Getting word in 2006 that some recalcitrant members were still teaching that the former policy was once a “doctrine” revealed by God, Hinckley mounted the podium in the church’s semi-annual general conference and scolded recidivist male members of the church: “How can any man holding the Melchizedek Priesthood arrogantly assume that he is eligible for the priesthood whereas another who lives a righteous life but whose skin is of a different color is ineligible?” 

While Hinckley neither claimed explicitly that the policy was man-made nor pinned responsibility for the misbegotten teaching on a single church leader, the implication of that speech and other public statements made it clear enough: mistakes had been made initially and  unwittingly reinforced over the generations.

Mormon leaders are inherently reluctant to find fault with their predecessors.  Institutional apologies are always laden with collateral challenges. In this case, some faithful Mormons might conclude politics and public opinion prompted the admission of error. Others may suggest it undercuts the religion’s claim to divine revelation. 

Nevertheless, after reviewing the history of the teaching, including the intermittent, if confusing pleas from prominent church leaders, and the concerns of thoughtful Mormons, Democrats and Republicans alike, it is increasingly clear that an apology is warranted.  Not only is it long overdue, but it would be welcomed by most Latter-day Saints, perhaps Mitt Romney especially. 

Mitt Moving To The Middle?

Now that the conventions are over and with Paul Ryan battening down the right wing of the party, Mitt may be marching back to the middle of the road.  This piece was published today by WBUR(Cognoscenti) in Boston and can be read below or at the WBUR site here:
http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2012/09/12/romney-moderate-republican-scott

September 12, 2012
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Mitt Moves To The Middle

By R.B. Scott

 

With Paul Ryan anchoring the right, Mitt Romney moderates. (AP Photo)

Peggy Noonan’s summary of the Democratic confab in Charlotte last week was caustic and blunt: “stale and empty,” she wrote in her Wall Street Journal column. President Obama is “out of juice.” Then the former principal speech writer for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush aimed warning salvos at the doppelganger leaders of her own party.

“The baby boomers have been supporting their grown children and their aged parents. They are stressed, stretched and largely uncomplaining, because they know that as boomers—shallow, selfish—they’re the only generation not allowed to complain…but they are spiritually and financially holding the country together, and they are coming to terms with the fact that it’s going to be that way for a good long time. They’re going to take a keen interest in where Medicaid goes. Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.”

On cue, a day later, Mitt Romney told NBC’s “Meet the Press” host David Gregory that he would not blow up “Obamacare” on Day One as he had once fervently pledged. Instead, with help from Democrats, he will refine it. Moreover, he blamed Republicans and Democrats alike for last spring’s budgetary crisis, the misbegotten attempt to link tax cuts to matching mandatory reductions in military spending.

Mitt Romney did what he had to do to get the nomination. Now, he will do what he needs to do to win the presidency.

Without much preamble he quietly hinted at a kinder, gentler Mitt Romney. “I am as conservative as the Constitution is,” he said, taking a giant step away from the “severely conservative” self-description he laid on the Conservative Political Action Committee just six months ago. He might just as well have said, “I am as liberal as the Constitution.”
What he means is that the U.S. Constitution, not partisan manifestos and flatulent campaign pledges, will be his bible should he be elected president. What a novel concept!
Just days into the real general election season and already Romney was sliding toward the safety of the middle, where he belongs, with the likes of his father, Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford and George Herbert Walker Bush. On cue, liberals and conservatives, pundits and bloggers, each for their own particular reasons, sputtered “liar, liar, pants on fire.”
Was anyone buying their howls? “Not many” seems to be the preliminary and appropriate response. Recent polls still project a photo finish in November, which they’ve been forecasting since July 2009.
Next question: Why didn’t the pundits see Mitt’s move to the middle coming? Romney has a storied history of skillfully reinventing himself – and getting away with it ‒ whenever necessary. Like the good management consultant he is, Romney sizes up the challenge, runs the numbers and reacts accordingly. He doesn’t fret over what was or wasn’t. He zeros in on what needs to be done to win and keep the business growing.
What’s next? Count on him to shamelessly carve out plenty of wiggle room on hot-button issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and gay rights, military spending and job creation. Management consultants like wiggle room just as much as politicians do.
Will his latest flip cost him many conservative votes? Probably not. Mitt appeased them with Paul Ryan, even if Ryan’s archconservative views on taxation and abortion will soon be eclipsed. What Romney seeks is support from the suburban, educated, baby-boomer independents Noonan described, who realize that fixes will require leadership, discipline and perseverance.
Even independents who think Romney is the quintessential flip-flopper, even a craven liar, are beginning to understand that he has faced challenges no Democrat does. To win his party’s nomination, he had to cozy up to the acolytes of the National Rifle Association, National Right to Life and the National Organization for Marriage, not to mention an unheavenly host of Christian evangelicals who thought Mormonism was next to Satanliness.
He did what he had to do to get the nomination. Now, he will do what he needs to do to win the presidency.
For instance, a more moderate and evolving approach to abortion could be rationally linked to constitutional rights. To bolster his switch, he could trot out the durable Mormon counsel ‒ “teach them well and let them govern themselves”‒ that he used in 1994 to rationalize his support for “choice.” Ditto same-sex marriage.
We know Romney craves complex, cleverly structured “win-win business deals,” so consider this: Could his recent saber-rattling at Iran and Russia foreshadow a tough Reaganesque approach to foreign policy? Could it also be inextricably linked to an (F.D.) Rooseveltesque “Happy Days Are Here Again” strategy for job creation?
America won’t have sabers to shake at Vladimir Putin and Mahmud Ahmadinejad unless it “invests” more in missiles, tanks, jeeps and jets, which in turn would create more jobs for, among others, unemployed auto workers in Michigan and Ohio who have grown children and aged parents to support. Need it be mentioned that both are critical swing states?
Finally, for the third straight month, the team raised more than $100 million. This explains why, in Romneyland, these are happy days indeed.

 

Republicans want more likeable Romney
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RON SCOTT, ROMNEY BIOGRAPHER: Possibly one of the shortcomings of his campaign so far is he's chosen to not voluntarily reveal more about himself than he could've. CRAIG MCMURTRIE: Ron Scott comes from Salt Lake City and like Mitt Romney is a ...
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Mitt Romney: Who's your Daddy

R.B. Scott writes about Mitt Romney and his father George for WBUR's "Cognoscenti" section.

http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2012/07/24/mitt-george-romney-rb-scott

MITT MYTHS: He says what he means, he just can't remember what the heck he said, exactly

Monday, May 21, 2012

By Ronald B. Scott         

Officially, Willard Mitt Romney has been auditioning for president of The United States since about 2002, perhaps even earlier. His every move and witticism seems well-rehearsed. He often delivers his lines awkward ways that may, in time, become endearing Romney trademarks. 

“Who let the dogs out, woof, woof,” he once barked, grinning goofily at some black teenage schoolgirls who had gathered to cheer him on. He intended no offense and, happily, miraculously, they took none. 

He seems as indefatigable as the Energizer Bunny – still running and running and running after all these years — yet opponents and pundits, friends and relatives, and the ordinary citizens have trouble connecting with him. They seem to respect him well enough. What’s not to respect? He looks like the Eagle Scout he should have been, but wasn’t. CCN newswoman Gloria Borger got it about right when she likened him to the steady, loyal, and nice, if disarmingly gawky young man mothers always want their fickle daughters to marry and settle down with. 

Team Romney has not exactly encouraged revealing, forthright profiles of their man. The guiding strategy seemed to be “the less people know about him, the better. And, mum’s the word on Mormonism until we get to the general election. And now we are here. The general election season is upon. It’s time to unveil some of the myths about Mitt.

MYTH: He single-handedly saved the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Practically everyone in Salt Lake City knows he didn’t. This is not true for the rest of the nation, however. In late 1998 headlines screamed that “bribery” was scandalizing the games. Romney bought into the hyperbole. Mixing metaphors, he quipped “if it looks like, walks like and quacks like a bribe…” Yet, the “bribes” were more like customary gratuities that had been requested. Federal charges against the two executives (Tom Welch and David Johnson) who allegedly authorized the bribes were summarily dispatched by U.S. District Judge David Sam who also issued a scathing rebuke The judge wrote that the case was “devoid of “criminal intent or evil purpose " and had “failed to meet the legal standard for bribery.” Despite acquittal, the lives of the two men were destroyed, although recently Johnson earned a modicum of public redemption. Late last year he was named bishop of his Mormon congregation in Holladay, Utah.

MYTH: Obamacare is not Romneycare. Mitt should be more careful of what he wishes for. After he engineered the nation’s first universal health care program, Romney crowed that the Massachusetts program should serve as a national model. That’s what he said. It’s on the record. President Obama agreed and soon the nation had Obamacare, a Federal program that conservatives hate and Romney now vows to rescind on his first day in office. He can’t do any such thing, of course, but it the pledge makes for energetic campaign ballyhoohaw. The fact is, the U.S. Supreme Court cut the legs out from under it shortly, which could put the entire matter back on the table for the general election season. This would give voters an opportunity to understand clearly what Romney finds wrong with “Obamacare.” Mitt’s chief beef ? He thinks health care should be tackled on a state by state basis. Should the court rule otherwise, expect Romney, if elected, to enforce the law. He worries that a Federal program will lead to a sprawling and unaccountable bureaucracy that will stifle competition and inflate costs. However, like Obama, Romney believes all Americans should have easy access to competent medical care. 

MYTH: Romney is so wealthy, he can not comprehend the nation’s needs. Practically no one worth only his next paycheck, dwindling savings, IRA, and the equity in his underwater home can relate to a man worth a couple of hundred million, who seems to effortlessly grow richer by the moment. Yet conservatives have argued convincingly that debt reduction, elimination of government “extravagances” are keys to restoring economic vitality. Mitt is really good at such stuff. His training as a Bain consultant–“first, stop the bleeding”—guides the process. After “swimming around in the numbers” over his first two weeks as Massachusetts governor, Romney surfaced with a “preliminary” plan to close the $650 million deficit by trimming $500 million from the budget. Some were cuts to allocations to cities and towns that were replaced by user fees, which detractors say are de’facto taxes and supporters claim restrain government intervention in local matters and eliminate wasteful entitlements. When he left office in 2006 he had balanced the budget for three consecutive years, generated revenue surpluses of $1.2 billion, and resolved the inherited $2-3 billion shortfall. He had developed and implemented the nation’s first universal healthcare plan and kept the unemployment rate at about 4.5 percent, one of the lowest in the nation. The big knock: job growth wasn’t huge. Of course, growing jobs when the unemployment rate is hovering around zero, growing jobs is a formidable, if not impossible challenge.

THE BIG MYTH: Mitt is a flip-flopper? Like most politicians, Romney tells voters what they want to hear. Sometimes make nice efforts are unnecessary. In 1994 when all but the votes were counted in his challenge to Senator Kennedy in 1994, Romney told the Wampanoag tribe in New Bedford that he thought building a gambling casino on their land was a good idea. Just as often, the alleged flip-flops spring from a desire to keep his options open knowing that the world and legislative process demands nuanced responses and compromises. Although he has always been personally opposed to abortion, from 1993 through about 2007 he supported “Choice” and the principles embodied in the landmark court decision Roe v. Wade. Now he says he favors the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Yet, it is unclear how he would lead a repeal effort as President or how far he would go. He has not yet clearly sorted out a consistent position on “morning after” treatments and disposal of embryos left over from the In Vitro Fertilization procedures used by three of his own children. While he has argued that “life” begins at “conception,” he has not defined when “conception” takes place. What is clear is that until Roe v. Wade is undone, Romney would faithfully abide by the law. Even though he personally opposed same gender marriage, when it became the law in Massachusetts he faithfully and actively enforced the law. Moreover, he remained committed to the principles of equal protection under law for same gender couples. His record in Massachusetts suggests that he will govern well come what may, que sera sera.

MYTH: Romney is anti-gay. Don’t tell that to that to Gordon Bowen, the very gay creative “genius” of McGarry Bowen, name Ad Age’s agency of the year for 2011. Bowen has been Romney’s main ad guy and close personal friend since about 1994 or even before. He was at Mitt’s side through the Olympics, the 2002 and 2008 elections, he has been a frequent guest at the Romney lakeside manse on Lake Winnipesaukee, and several Romney sons were tenants in Bowen sumptuous apartments in Manhattan. Although has been on the down low through this part of the election cycle, Bowen is likely lurking in the weeds until Romney no longer needs to kiss the self-righteous asses of the radical Christian right.

MYTH: A Mormon can not win the Republican nomination: And, Mitt really didn't say " ...I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was..."