Politico, a left-leaning political political site, ran an article claiming President Obama intends to run a campaign painting Mitt Romney as weird. I first heard of it through an article by Lane Williams in the Deseret News. I follow Lane and I admire his work, but sometimes he gets excited about things so I approached the topic cautiously, since he seemed to suggest the reason for the label was Mitt Romney’s Mormonism.
Let me start by clarifying who I am politically. That matters when you’re reading about politics. I am politically independent—so independent, in fact, that in the last election I managed to vote fifty-fifty for each party and not by design. I study what the church teaches—what it really teaches and not what I think it teaches—and then match my politics to that. Where there is no official statement, I look at what we do know and guess where the church might stand. I’ve had a pretty good track record. I correctly anticipated the church’s actions on environmentalism, on the gay rights bill in Salt Lake City (where they encouraged giving housing and employment protection to homosexuals) and on the illegal immigration uproar. Not needing to line up with any party, I don’t have to worry about anything but the gospel point of view.
So, with all that in mind, and knowing I won’t choose who to vote for in this election based on party affiliation, I looked at the whole issue strictly from a gospel and writing perspective. There are two accusations Politico is accused of making. The first is that President Obama intends to portray Mitt Romney as weird. The second is that weird is code for Mormon. These are two entirely different claims and must be looked at separately. In addition, there is the issue of what the Politico writer actually said and what people think he said, which are not the same thing.
If you look at the first paragraph of the article—I’m analytical and this is how I do things—you’ll see they say President Obama’s aids and advisors are planning an attack on Romney’s character and business background. They don’t list a source for this information in this paragraph. Romney’s own attacks on the president have been very vicious and not really in line with the teachings of church leaders on political civility, so he—and his supporters—really can’t complain about that. God’s rules apply to politics, but sometimes people say things about oponants they’d never say about a ward member.
Paragraph two is an analysis showing Romney is the Republican front-runner and paragraph three says they are studying Bush’s techniques for bringing down front-runners. Nothing there.
Paragraph four says a strategist says they have to kill Romney. Clearly that isn’t literal, but note that no names are given. It just says he’s a prominent advisor aligned with the White House…which could mean anything. Last winter I stood outside the White House. I was probably aligned with it then, too. One conservative online site once listed a highly knowledgeable source who went unnamed but turned out to be the writer’s next door neighbor with no credentials, who was speculating…gossiping, you might say. Without names, that source could be anybody. I could be a prominent advisor if I wrote a lot of letters to the president. Whether or not he listened to me might be another story. Advising and being listened to are not the same thing.
A few more paragraphs and then we get to the important part. Read this paragraph:
“’There’s a weirdness factor with Romney, and it remains to be seen how he wears with the public,’” the adviser said, noting that the contrasts they’d drive between the president and the former Massachusetts governor would be “based on character to a great extent.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/60921.html#ixzz1VDqhPl5Q
Aha…here’s where it says President Obama is going to portray Romney as weird. Except…that’s not what it says, is it? It says some unnamed source said Romney has a weirdness factor. It doesn’t’ say the president said it and it doesn’t say the president’s campaign intends to say that. It says this unnamed source, who could be anyone at all, says Romney has weirdness. So, we’re all jumping to conclusions, here, right? Right.
You have to get all the way to the third page before you get to the weirdness thing again so you can find out what the weirdness factor actually is.
“Democrats also plan to amplify what Obama strategists described as the “weirdness” quotient, the sum of awkward public encounters and famous off-kilter anecdotes, first among them the tale of Romney having strapped his dog to the roof of his car.
None of the Obama advisers interviewed made any suggestion that Romney’s personal qualities would be connected to his minority Mormon faith, but the step from casting Romney as a bit off to raising questions about religion may not be a large step for some of the incumbent’s supporters.”
So, where did Lane get his rant? From a paragraph that very specifically says his advisors made no—repeat no—suggestion that religion would enter into it. It was the reporter who made that little suggestion and planted it securely in everyone’s mind.
I can’t prove a motive here, but since it is a liberal publication, my guess would be that they, like the Obama campaign, would much rather the president run against the other two front-runners, who are much less of a threat. We get all excited and spread this story around—focusing on the subliminal hint the writer created—and those who aren’t Mormon see it and get the weird Mormon thing planted in their minds. We’re doing their work for them. If you’re a Republican, they aren’t on your side, remember. Did you know the political slant of the site before you quoted them?
So what do we learn from all this? People who know me know I’m intense about sourcing and propaganda. When people tell me something that doesn’t sound right, I ask for a source. I want a real source, not one with an agenda. Political sites aligned with a specific party—either party– have an agenda. That’s not to say they can’t be right, but we have to watch them more closely. We have to watch for clues, such as loaded words. A loaded word is one that evokes emotion instead of rational thought. It’s the difference between saying someone is a conservative and saying he is a rabid right-wing nutjob. Sometimes they are more subtle than that, but you get the idea. Putting the president’s middle name into his name is using loaded language. It’s secret code for “Let’s pretend he’s a Muslim and we all hate Muslims.” In other words, it is very un-Christian behavior. So watch for loaded language.
Quotes are always a problem. If they are unsourced, we can’t verify them. We can never prove the reporter didn’t make them up and we can never prove they were taken out of context. If you see an unnamed source, keep in the back of your mind that it proves nothing.
Quotes can also, as I said, be taken out of context. I have a silly little example I often use to explain how this works. You can read the article, which also discusses how to verify sources, here:
Next, always go to the source. Everyone has been quoting Lane’s article, but it appears he read it a little too hastily. This happens when we go looking for reasons to be offended. We don’t need to be doing that. We also need to be careful not to spread gossip, which means we have a moral obligation to read the original article and not someone else’s commentary on it. If it were about your candidate or your spouse or you, how careful would you want people to be before they spread the story? That’s how careful you have to be when it’s about a candidate you don’t like. God didn’t exempt politics from the rules. I made this same moral mistake this morning. I didn’t go to the original article, thinking it was gossip, which I don’t read. Because I didn’t, I made comments that were spiritually valid, but didn’t use the opportunity to note the article never really said what Lane said it said. The truth is that calling Romney weird isn’t automatically about his Mormonism, which Lane suggested it was. He was making assumptions, just as the reporter warned would happen. There are many ways in which to be weird. I’m weird, and it has nothing to do with my religion. “That doesn’t change the fact that calling Romney, a Mormon, “weird” is nasty politics,” Lane said. Is the suggestion then that he can’t be considered weird if he’s a Mormon? I don’t think we can have different rules for Mormon candidates and non-Mormon candidates. Weird is just an opinion, but spreading a story that isn’t true is more than just an opinion It is the kind of thing that will hurt us in the long run. People are getting tired of Mormons whining about being persecuted. As I wrote in another article, what the early Mormons experienced was true persecution. Calling what we’re getting today persecution is pretty insulting to those early Mormons. This is nothing but an opportunity. Let’s treat it as such.