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I’m starting to wonder if the criticism of Romney as a flip-flopper is just proxy for the real concern: bigotry against Mormons, of which, unabashedly, Romney is one.
About Daniel BurtonDaniel Burton lives in Salt Lake County, Utah, where he practices law by day and everything else by night. You can follow him on his blog PubliusOnline.com where he muses on politics, the law, books and ideas. He is active on social media, Republican politics, and has been named to PoliticIt’s list of the “Top-50 Utah Political Opinion Leaders” on Twitter. You can reach him directly at dan.burton@gmail.com
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I think so, especially since 90% of what he’s supposedly flip-flopped on doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Can’t trust the guy, and I share the same religion!
The Republican primary is a challenge for me. I feel like we need some pretty fundamental change and Mitt looks like George Bush III or Obama-lite to me. I want to like him, but so far I can’t.
He’d be labeled a flip flopper no matter what religion he is, and I disagree with Jeff Drake…the reason that accusation sticks is because to a lot of people, it does stand up to scrutiny.
Maybe Mormons are in denial of that…is it easier to claim bigotry against Mormons than to acknowledge that a Mormon presidential contender has shifted his stance on certain issues in order to be more electable?
It does frustrate me, mostly because I really liked him and his policies when he was Governor of Massachusetts. I was very disappointed in the last election to see him change so much. So I agree with the flip-flopper accusations.
The fact that he has changed positions on key issues makes it easy for people to wrongly deduce that Mitt Romney’s flip-flopping is a reflection of his Mormon faith. They see him as unprincipled and opportunistic, and are associating those characteristics with his faith. That’s wrong to do, but it’s a pretty common way of stereotyping other people, isn’t it?
I’m not saying that there isn’t real bigotry against Mormons, because there certainly is. The bigotry is manifest by insinuating that he is “weird” or “strange”, despite the fact that he’s about the straightest arrow in the quiver.
But Mitt Romney is not labeled a flip-flopper because of bigotry. He’s labeled a flip-flopper because he’s changed his stance on significant issues in order to appeal to more conservatives.
Claiming bigotry against Mormons because they’re calling Romney a flip flopper is kind of like the Clintons claiming a vast right wing conspiracy every time something didn’t go their way, instead of recognizing the fact that they were wrong.
I really like that cartoon though.
Is it wrong for a politician to change his (or her) position? Do we really want ideological purity in the persons we elect? Or only when the persons elected agree with us on policies?
On the flip-flop/bigotry, I don’t know that the point is that people call him a flip-flopper because he is a Mormon, but rather that it is used a lot more because it serves as a excusable criticism that religion is not. It’s permissible, but the real reason–that 40% of America does not want to vote for a Mormon–is considered bigotry.
But really–how much of America really knows enough about a candidate to call them a flip-flopper? On the other hand, flip-flop is an easy short hand that can be picked up from the talking heads and used to provide an excuse that really doesn’t match reality–not the reality of whether he is or not, but the reality about why people may choose not to vote for him….
But back to the beginning of my thought: how bad do we think it is for a politician to change his mind?