Jeff Jacoby claims in today’s column that Teddy Kennedy won in 1994 by slaggin’ Mitt Romney’s religion.
Or rather, Jeff simply highlights that notion without comment having culled it from Mitt’s now satiric profile in the National Review.
This is of course, sheer nonsense.
As I recall, Teddy and Joe Kennedy’s halfhearted swipes at Bishop Romney’s Mormonism engendered no small amount of criticism as the campaign unfolded.
Alas, and there I was telling people a man’s religion was of no consequence in a political campaign.
No, Teddy abandoned that sterile line of attack and crushed Romney in debate by emphasizing his own record of public service, liberal achievement and his own unique insight into governance.
Oh course it helps to have a consistent lifelong ideology as well; that being a firm belief in the necessity for “transmission belts” from out the underclass & into the middle class. Sometimes that transmission belt requires federal funding, and always it must be a transparent prone untainted by sectarianism. He is man on the side of those in the making first and foremost.
That’s what Teddy believes, that is what he talked about and that is why he won.
Mitt Romney meanwhile, skulked off to Utah in a pout and when it can time to rush back and run for Governor brazenly recruited who knows how many out of state Mormons to man the polls on election day.
So much for my own nice suburban liberal notions of keeping religion out of the campaign eh?
Ah but Jeff forgets all this doesn't he?
Today's conservative likes to re-write the past with Orwellian abandon, either to feed the movement's insatiable sense of greivance or else to tart themselves up as lonely iconoclastic heroes.

Sick
Demented
Typical...