Put Some Windex On It

Here's some happy news:

A new study of British civil servants shows that cognitive skills such as memory and reasoning are already declining, typically, among people as young as 45.

GOP Sports Gaffe Watch

Reading Andrew Sullivan's GOP live blog, a commentator notes:

Romney and Santorum would spend tonight watching a football game being played on Monday. Newt would be watching a basketball game being played in April.

Politics, Religion, And The Nixon Covenant

In this post on some Christians' opposition to Mitt Romney on the basis of religion, I left off what I thought. This morning a couple of smart Facebook friends called me out. First, a buddy from Andover:

Half my ancestors are Mormon, going back to the beginning of the church. It is entirely legitimate to question the judgment of someone who enthusiastically participates in a fantasy based on an obvious fraud, concocted to feed the appetites for power and sex of the founders. And I don't just mean the GOP.

In reply, an Episcopal church friend:

I remember when I was a child and JFK was running for President. The “Protestant” fear was that if a Roman Catholic was elected, the Pope would rule America. Maybe the same people who are so critical about separation of church and state can now find some comfort in it.

I wrote:

You have [cogently] set the goalposts of a debate that will almost inevitably occur if Romney is nominated. I defer to [my first friend's] personal insights and confess to some concerns about the tenets of Mormonism. Of course [Christopher] Hitchens felt the same about orthodox Christianity. [The Episcopal] church has rightly been stressing comity among the three Abrahamic faiths. Any proponents of that view, who would naturally and correctly aver that there would be nothing wrong with electing a Jew or a Muslim, would, I assume, want to take the same view about a Mormon. In the end, the only way to avoid a descent into sheer chaos is to respect the covenant we've reached about a religion test that [my second friend] described.

As I wrote that, I imagined someone saying, "What covenant is that, and when did I sign it?" Hold onto your prayer books, because it was written by Richard Nixon, and it's stood all these years. The question is whether it will survive 2012.

Nixon's covenant was a promise he made to himself and the country and courageously kept throughout one of the closest campaigns in history. As the the GOP nominee in 1960, he said he wouldn't make John F. Kennedy's Roman Catholicism an issue. In Nixon's own words, from the third of their four debates:

[A]s far as religion is concerned, I have seen Communism abroad. I see what it does. Communism is the enemy of all religions; and we who do believe in God must join together. We must not be divided on this issue. The worst thing that I can think can happen in this campaign would be for it to be decided on religious issues. I obviously repudiate the Klan; I repudiate anybody who uses the religious issue; I will not tolerate it, I have ordered all of my people to have nothing to do with it and I say to this great audience, whoever may be listening, remember, if you believe in America, if you want America to set the right example to the world, that we cannot have religious or racial prejudice. We cannot have it in our hearts. But we certainly cannot have it in a presidential campaign.

Nixon was ideally positioned to enunciate and enforce this principle. A Yorba Linda and Whittier Quaker and a deep introvert besides, most of his theological inquiry and conversation with the divine was interior. He was a skeptic about the bodily Resurrection of Christ. He loved upbeat preachers such Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and Robert Schuller, but he wasn't a consistent churchgoer. In the White House, his interfaith services were a model that liberal seminaries would have been proud to borrow.

His faith may have deepened late in life. I worked for him from 1979 until his death in 1994. In the 1980s, when I was his chief of staff, he talked a lot about his philosophical reading. I regret that I never had a chance to ask what he thought about my call to ordained ministry. I couldn’t have, since it occurred in part because of professional and personal turmoil after he died. But he made a telling eschatological prediction not long after Mrs. Nixon’s funeral in 1993, when I was meeting with him and a potential library contributor in his New Jersey office. The man, from Japan, diplomatically mentioned a possible gift. Nixon said, “Mrs. Nixon would be pleased.” He paused and added quietly, “Is pleased.”

Still, the free-thinking Nixon probably wouldn't have been mainstream American Protestants' first choice to negotiate the terms of their political engagement with Roman Catholicism. And yet his rule has essentially been followed for a half-century. Outside of reporting about the narrative of the candidates' lives, religion rarely came up, for instance, when Mormon George Romney was preparing to run in 1968 or born-again Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter ran and won in 1976.

The boldest challenge to the Nixon covenant came from the right in 2008, when Fox News and others smeared Barack Obama with the extreme views of his United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I can understand those who said that Wright opened the door with his harsh denunciations of U.S. policy. But any systematic effort to load a religious leader's baggage onto a parishioner-candidate's back would shatter the Nixon covenant -- and more candidacies than one might at first think.

Many politicians, for instance, have sought the counsel of Billy Graham as well as the PR benefit of associating with him. He served as a gracious officiant at President and and Mrs. Nixon's funerals, which I oversaw at the Nixon library. In June 1993, as he and I waited alone in the lobby for the family to arrive with Mrs. Nixon's casket, I asked what he was up to. He said he had just decided to sell his memoirs to Rupert Murdoch's publishing company, though he’d been reluctant at first because of the risqué photos that appeared in some of Murdoch’s London tabloids. “But then I realized,” Graham said, “that those photographs are actually inducements so that his working class readers will have the opportunity to encounter a good conservative editorial message.”

I asked if he thought that anything would come along to reverse the general decline in cultural standards that had become so glaringly obvious.

“Why, yes,” he said.

“What will it be, in your opinion?” I said.

“Armageddon,” he said.

According to Fox News' Jeremiah Wright rule, a reporter would have the right to ask all candidates who are friendly with preachers who believe as Graham does whether they agree that the Almighty LORD was about to send his avenging angels to smite the world in its wickedness. "Will that be in your first or second term?" the reporter might ask. "Aren't those views indistinguishable from Ahmadinejad's? How will your belief in the imminent end times affect your decisions about how to use military power?"

You see where that leads. Here are more examples of what could happen to conservatives and progressives alike if we hold each other accountable for our religious views. Mitt Romney may well believe he'll get a planet when he dies, maybe two if he's really good. But we still need the Nixon covenant, now more than ever.

"Silver Threads And Golden Needles"

Be still my rockin' heart: Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, her former band, helping invent alt.-country. Hat tip to my blogging buddy Deke Rivers.

Romney's Tie (And I Don't Mean Iowa)

When Erik Eckholm writes about Christian evangelicals' increasingly frantic efforts to find an alternative to Mitt Romney, you have to read between the lines to find the real story.

They're afraid he's squishy on abortion and same-sex marriage, Eckholm writes. They want a real conservative, like health care mandate-favoring climate change hawk Newt Gingrich. The head of the Florida Family Policy Council goes so far as to say that Gingrich is "probably...the most viable candidate in the general election." Say what? Gingrich comes with more baggage than the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. President Obama loves his chances in that match-up, and everybody knows it, including, I'd assume, Erik Eckholm.

You can't see dark matter, which holds the universe together, and at least in this article you can't see what's bringing these evangelicals together: Their dislike of the LDS. You'd think Romney's Mormonism would be worth at least a paragraph, if only to let evangelical leaders deny that it's an issue. But Eckholm doesn't go near it. Reuters reporters Ros Krasny and Patricia Zengerl, possibly saucy Brits, aren't so shy. They report speculation that Rick Santorum played the religion card against Romney just yesterday while on the stump in New Hampshire:

Santorum has been challenged for comments such as likening same-sex relationships to bestiality and saying states should be allowed to ban birth control. In Concord, New Hampshire, on Thursday, he was booed after appearing to compare gay marriage to polygamy and saying children of same-sex couples were being "harmed."

Some in the audience wondered if the polygamy reference was a coded reference to Romney's Mormonism.

Polls last year showed both that most evangelicals don't believe that Mormons are Christians and that they were less supportive of Romney that GOP voters in general. Sure, their lukewarm political support might be because of his more moderate views on social issues while serving as governor of Massachusetts. The Times' Eckholm seems inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. In a June 2011 post, journalist Mark Joseph wasn't:

Years ago I once interviewed comedian Jay Leno and he told me something I've never forgotten and think of quite often: when he wants to make fun of a fat man, he never makes fun of him for being fat; rather, he makes fun of his tie.

I think of Leno's maxim whenever I hear conservative Christian voters criticizing Mitt Romney for his alleged failings like Romneycare, flip-flopping, lack of personality etc. because like Leno, what I think they're really doing is describing his "tie" instead of saying what they truly mean to say: he's a Mormon.

As this obfuscation indicates however, it's a prejudice that nobody wants to cop to because there seems to be a general feeling that it's an icky one and so as a result, mainstream journalists continue to be befuddled over Romney's lack of success and try to blame it on the various criticisms of his "tie," only it's not about his "tie," it's about his religion.

Don's Snowflakes

You know that guy at the office, Mr. Passive-Aggressive? Never says what he thinks in a meeting but then sends e-mails around dissing everybody and taking credit for their ideas? What if he's running the Pentagon? Condi Rice, President Bush's first-term national security adviser, wastes little time in her new memoir, No Higher Honor, before getting to the nub of her and and Secretary of State Colin Powell's problems with Don Rumsfeld:

Don would send memos (snowflakes, we called them) that implicitly -- and sometimes explicitly -- criticized what State or the NSC was doing. Often those memos reflected discussions that had already taken place, but they left the impression that it was Don imparting new wisdom or making an important recommendation. In meetings, he would ask Socratic questions rather than take a position.

I Paid For Some Of It At The Office

Writing about a new study of moderate Republicans, Timothy Noah says the tea party is actually a big-spending social welfare movement dedicated expressly to its own social welfare:

[T]he Tea Partiers’ anti-­government ideology is tempered by quiet support for Social Security and Medicare. That’s because the activists themselves tend to be middle-aged or older. Tea Partiers aren’t opposed to government benefits per se, according to [Theda] Skocpol and [Vanessa] Williamson; rather, they’re opposed to “unearned” government benefits, which in practice ends up meaning any benefits extended to African-­Americans, Latinos, immigrants (especially undocumented ones) and the young. A poll of South Dakota Tea Party supporters found that 83 percent opposed any Social Security cuts, 78 percent opposed any cuts to Medicare prescription-drug coverage, and 79 percent opposed cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and hospitals. “So much for the notion that Tea Partiers are all little Dick Armeys,” Skocpol and Williamson write. The small government Tea Partiers favor is one where I get mine and most others don’t get much at all.

Feast Of Epiphany Light

Light does interesting things in the St. John Chrysostom chapel at St. John's Church.

Newt's Defining Foment

Robert Wright recalls Newt Gingrich's 2010 demagoguery about Muslims and declaration of war on the First Amendment:

Gingrich said they shouldn't be able to build a mosque within a few blocks of the World Trade Center site just as "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington." Surely Gingrich is smart enough to see the problem with this analogy. (Hint: The 9/11 attacks were organized by a terrorist group called al Qaeda, not by a religion called Islam.) But he knows that people who hate Muslims won't fuss over details--and if the Nazi comparison amps up their hatred, so much the better for the politician who champions their cause.

Time For A Hard Liberalism

As Islamist parties coalesce into a parliamentary majority in Egypt, Leon Wieseltier urges democracy's real adherents in the world to pay close attention:

The Islamists do not agree that a codification of rights is a condition of democratic life, and regard it instead as an outcome of democratic life that they wish to avoid. But rights are prior or they are not real. So a hard liberalism is needed now, respectful but suspicious, coldly resolute, undeceived by the bliss of passing solidarity, aware that the party of the open society has too often assisted in its own demise.