Udall and the two Romneys
Mo Udall and George Romney.
Two Mormons who pursued the Presidential nomination for the two major parties.
George Romney was the front-runner for the Republican nomination until he offered up a gaffe to the effect that he was brainwashed by the Viet-Cong, a statement that no matter what a voter thought about the Vietnam War unnerved everyone.
I saw something about Mo Udall from contemporaneous sources from 1976 arguring against the use of “liberal” to use in conjunction with his politics, instead urging the word “progressive”, which may or may not be a major point of departure for one of the most obnoxious words in America — and I have been meaning to look up and sort out the histories of those two words and how they came to have their precise usages today. As for Udall’s birth-faith, from wikipedia:
During the Michigan primary, the Carter campaign had Coleman Young, the mayor of Detroit, accuse Udall of racism for belonging to the Mormon church, which at the time, did not allow blacks to serve in the church’s priesthood (since changed in 1978 by revelation to the Mormon prophet, Spencer Kimball). Young’s attack was at least somewhat unfair, since Udall had been a longtime critic of that church policy, and had ceased being an active member because of it. Carter’s subsequent sweeping of the black vote in the Michigan primary was key to his crucial and narrow victory in Michigan.
Today, Mitt Romney is running for the presidency, and his Mormonism is believed to be a negative to the Christian Right in particular and the nation at large — and a prominent conservative has a book out entitled “A Mormon in the White House”, and Mitt Romney is walking a fine line in offering up that he does indeed worship Jesus. I do not know if all of this afflicted his father when he ran for president. I do know that George never strapped his dog on top of his car in a cross country vacation, or professed admiration for a book written by the founder of Scientology, so maybe these things have a way of working itself off without regard to these things.
I will say that while a Mormon may end up in the White House eventually, I do not believe that we will ever elect a polygamist to the White House. A homosexual may end up in the White House down the road, but in terms its subcultures, I suspect that we won’t elect a drag queen — gay or straight, which I guess means that Giuliani is out.