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Candidate Romney's Mormon faith stokes whisper campaign
Mitt Romney's Mormonism isn't something his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination talk much about in public, but his faith appears to have stoked a whisper campaign, engineered by an Iowa staffer for Senator Sam Brownback, Republican, Kansas.
- By Chris Cillizza and Shailagh Murra, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
- Published: 23:37 June 18, 2007
Washington: Mitt Romney's Mormonism isn't something his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination talk much about in public, but his faith appears to have stoked a whisper campaign, engineered by an Iowa staffer for Senator Sam Brownback, Republican, Kansas.
In an email we obtained, former state Republican Emma Nemecek, the southeastern Iowa field director for Brownback's presidential campaign, asked a group of Iowa Republican leaders to help her fact-check a series of statements about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including one that says: "Theologically, the only thing Christianity and the LDS church has in common is the name of Jesus Christ, and the LDS Jesus is not the same Jesus of the Christian faith.''
The email appears to be a thinly veiled attempt to push negative talking points on Mormonism to influence power brokers in Iowa, where Brownback and Romney are engaged in a struggle for socially conservative voters in advance of the state's January 14, 2008, caucuses.
Abortion issue
Of late, Brownback has publicly taken on Romney over the abortion issue - insisting that Romney's conversion to an anti-abortion-rights position is more political positioning than personal evolution.
But Romney's faith has not been a topic of contention for Brownback - a former Methodist who has become an evangelical Roman Catholic - until now.
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