Eating Dogs and other new political issues

The goal of the Democratic Party will be to portray Mitt Romney as a combination of out of touch with the common folks or just simply weird. The left's attack on the Mormon faith on MSNBC is just part of the strategy.  Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer stated: "It's kind of ironic given that his family came from a polygamy commune in Mexico, but then he'd have to talk about his family coming from a polygamy commune in Mexico, given the gender discrepancy… Women are not great fans of polygamy, 86 percent were not great fans of polygamy. I am not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle, but his father was born into [a] polygamy commune in Mexico."

Yes, it is true that Mitt Romney’s father was born in Mexico, but his grandparents were not polygamists even though it is true that there are polygamists in the Romney family tree. However that would be true for many Mormons since it wasn’t until 1890 that Mormonism outlawed polygamy as part of a condition allowing Utah to become a state.

Guess who else has family members with a polygamist past? Oh yeah, Barack Hussein Obama, whose father was a polygamist. New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof agonized on what to report after he visited Obama father’s hometown. As he noticed, “Frankly, I worry that enemies of Obama will seize upon details like his grandfather's Islamic faith or his father's polygamy to portray him as an alien or a threat to American values. But snobbishness and paranoia ill-become a nation of immigrants, where one of our truest values is to judge people by their own merits, not their pedigrees.” Unless that immigrant is a Republican, then it is all fair game. If Romney's family history with polygamy is fair game so is Obama’s family history with polygamy, and Obama's family history is more recent!

Of course there is the dog controversy when efforts were used to shame Romney over his Clark Griswold treatment of his dog on a trip when he put the family pet on the top of the car. This lasted as long as some smart pundit actually read Dreams of My Fathers and noted, Obama not only ate dog meat but even rated it. So there was fun to be had by all at the President's expense about Obama’s dog eating past in Indonesia.

Mormonism's past with race will certainly be brought up, but then didn’t Obama sit two decades in the pew of a noted black racist with views that are or should be out of the mainstream? You bring up Mormon history with blacks, and I will read Jeremiah Wright’s sermons.

The attack by Hilary Rosen on Ann Romney pretty much derailed “the war on women” campaign for the time being as Ms. Rosen commented on Ms. Romney never working for a living fell apart as soon as Ms. Romney, cancer survivor and presently living with MS, simply reminded Ms. Rosen that being a mother can be hard work.

So we have the Democrats using Romney's Mormon past as a means to put him outside the American mainstream, but then how weird is a dog eating President? And yes, Romney is a wealthy man and maybe he doesn’t have that deft touch to communicate with common folks, but just when did Obama become a man of the people? When he was not community organizing, he was involved in politics, and when Obama was voting present in the Illinois Legislature, Romney was helping to create jobs for many of those blue collar folks. Obama once stated that many blue collar workers cling to their guns and God, mocking the common man that he supposedly loves to rich Democratic donors in San Francisco. Romney created jobs for the common man that Obama derided.

The Walls Street Journal's Jim Taranto summed up both men when he said, “The truth is that Romney and Obama are both products of distinctively American subcultures--respectively, the Mormon Church and the academic left. The difference is that whereas the Mormons, for more than a century, have aspired to join the American mainstream, the academic left is aggressively adversarial. It's true that there is much about Mormonism that seems odd to people of other faiths. But a contest over whose opponent is weirder is one Obama cannot possibly win.” And as Obama commented, dog meat can be tough so don’t forget maybe slow cooking Fido will make Fido a little more tender.