The “I have a Religion” Speech

As promised, I’ve had the opportunity to look over the Romney “I have a Religion” speech.

As such things go, it wasn’t bad.  Romney  demonstrated a better public speaking ability than I thought he had.  That was my first surprise.  He articulated his thought fairly well, I thought.

That said, let’s get down to what those thoughts amounted to.  The main direction, of the speech, by my reading, was that all believers are American.

Hmm. While I’m sure the words were heartfelt, I can’t help but think that it sounds alarmingly like the patronizing inclusiveness pap that leftists invariably toss around almost as a knee jerk reaction every time a microphone gets shoved in their faces, and usually within a few hours of leveling the charge of “Bigot” at someone.  I am left with the uncomfortable feeling that one gets in the office of an overly aggressive used car salesman.

We dig further into the patronizing nonsense, when Romney starts invoking the will of the framers, as regards a religious test for high office.  It seems a little out of place to be talking about whether or not Americans should you’d be talking about such things, when the question at hand is not whether or not run the is to be president, but whether or not the republican party of these United States should be nominating him to run for that office.   Those two situations represent rather dramatically different things.  Certainly, there is no governmental tests for running for high office.  The question of whether not there should be a test within the minds of each of the voters, is left unaddressed by the framers, however.  It is therefore presumptious on the part of Mr. Romney to try and recast the argument, now.

My feed alarm just went off, telling me there’s an article for something or another involving Harry Reid.  That name, being among the many strings that I have my systems surging four, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  And that name brings to mind the fact that Mr. Reid is also a Mormon.  This, in turn, brings to mind almost immediately the question of can we possibly see senator Harry Reid running for the presidency, finding himself in the position of having to give such as speech.  The answer, of course, is “no”.  Then again, the democrats don’t have a large number of clergy along the lines of a Mike Huckabee running, either.  So much for the oft talked about but never evidenced resurgence eight of the “religious left”.

I think the concern about all of this can be traced down to the same kind of politics which insists that a representative of a given district must be black to properly represent a district filled with blacks.  Or, of Irish descent, if he is  in such a district and so on. It’s not very often that you see people are calling such things bigotry.  Yet why is it that in this case, people looking for representation by someone who understands their values and their moralities immediately gets labeled as bigots ?

Perhaps the reason that you will never see Harry Reid  making such a speech, is driven by the same set of factors that insists a black person cannot be bigoted.

In any event, I tend do agree with a large number of the pundits looking at this, who suggest that it probably isn’t going to make a whole bunch of difference in terms of raw numbers at the primary polls.   Then again, I’m beginning to suspect that it isn’t going to take much difference, deflect the Republican nomination race one way or the other.  Much the same as it’s not going to take a great deal to tip the presidential race itself, one way or the other. as I suggested earlier today, it’s pebbles that start avalanches.

Memeorandum has lots more as you would expect.