he uproar last week over a proposed campaign ad highlighting President Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, lit up political circles before organizers finally backed off the idea.
And Mitt Romney came under fire from evangelicals before his speech to Liberty University in Virginia earlier this month because some at the traditional Christian school still believe Mormonism is a cult.
Two very different
candidates joined by similar, yet hollow, attacks on their faith
illustrate the intense mix of identity politics simmering just beneath
the surface of the presidential race.
When it comes to faith
and race, there are some who want to paint both candidates as outside
the mainstream, not members of the traditional American club. They want
to paint them as "others."
Both Obama, the nation's
first black president, and Romney, a Mormon, have found that their
shared status as members of minority groups and political pioneers, in
many ways, has also changed the rules of this presidential campaign
cycle, said Nancy Wadsworth, co-editor of the anthology "Faith and Race
in American Political Life."
"It's the elephant in the
room," Wadsworth said. "On the Democratic side, the liability of
raising (Romney's) Mormonism and putting it under closer scrutiny means
they will be accused of religious intolerance. If (Republicans) bring up
Jeremiah Wright, they'll be accused of using the race card."
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So both presidential
campaigns are adhering to a tenuous, unwritten hands-off agreement when
it comes to race and religion even as they themselves struggle to
navigate those waters. But the same rules may not neccesarily apply to
their supporters, third-party groups and well-heeled super PACs.
Romney condemned the
Wright ad proposal pitched to billionaire Joe Ricketts and his
conservative super PAC. Likewise, senior Obama campaign adviser David
Axelrod reiterated to Candy Crowley on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday
that critiques of Romney's Mormonism are "not fair game."
The success or failure of
the two campaigns' attempts to remove these topics from the table could
speak volumes this fall on how far the nation has come on divisive race
and religion-based debates in the political sphere, political experts
say.
It won't be easy.
Outside groups, such as
the conservative website "The Daily Caller," have criticized Obama for
eating dog meat as a child growing up in Indonesia. Republican Arizona
Secretary of State Ken Bennett is demanding Hawaiian officials
authenticate Obama's U.S. birth certificate, or he may remove the
president from the ballot.
Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer,
a Democrat, recently questioned whether female voters could back
Romney, because his father was "born on a polygamy commune in Mexico."
According to a recent Gallup poll, Democrats were far more likely than
Republicans -- 27% to 18% -- to vote against a Mormon candidate.
Some Democrats struggle to contend with Obama's race. Vice President Joe Biden was recently dispatched
to Democratic stronghold Jefferson County in the important swing state
of Ohio, in part because Obama barely eked out a win over John McCain in
the predominately white, working-class community.
Some Republicans wrestle
with Romney's religion. During the primary and caucus season, several
social conservative and religious leaders secretly met in Iowa to find
and support any other Republican candidate besides Romney, citing his
faith as a major issue.
"There will be a number
of Republican evangelicals who stay home because of Romney's Mormonism,"
said Clyde Wilcox, a government professor at Georgetown University.
Hundreds of evangelical
alumni and students at Liberty University, an institution founded by
Rev. Jerry Falwell, balked on Facebook when the school invited Romney to
speak at commencement. Rev. O'Neal Dozier in Florida and Scott Thomas
in Pennsylvania, prominent Rick Santorum supporters, made derogatory
comments about the Mormon faith.
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The claim is that Barack
Obama is secretly a Muslim, Wadsworth said. The reason that it works is
it signals through code his otherness, he said. "Race is always there."
"Obama can never get out
from under his racial difference. He has to position himself as not
'other'. Race serves Romney because his whiteness reads him as insider.
But on religion, he has to tell a story about how his Mormonism is an
American religion and coincides with his conservative base."
On both fronts, Obama and Romney are still trying to find their footing.
Obama has faltered a bit in the past while navigating the thorny issue of race. He made what was seen as a historic speech on race in March 2008 in the aftermath of the Wright controversy.
However, Obama's remarks in 2009 that a white Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer acted "stupidly" in arresting Henry Louis Gates Jr., a black Harvard professor, and his administration's hasty firing of Shirley Sherrod
in, a black former Department of Agriculture official, after her
comments about a white farmer were taken out of context in 2010, were
seen as missteps.
Obama's delayed response
after unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin was shot indicated the
president and his advisers were "gauging the cultural landscape," said
Mark Anthony Neal, an African-American studies professor at Duke
University and the author of several books, including "New Black Man:
Rethinking Black Masculinity."
For his part, Romney in
previous campaigns has weathered insults about his religion. In a
February interview with conservative Fox host Sean Hannity, Romney
criticized comments that he saw as Obama saying "we must be a less
Christian nation."
And Romney, through
appearances with his wife and family, is carefully honing a narrative
that seeks to make him seem more like the rest of the nation, Wadsworth
said.
"The fact that the leading GOP candidate is a Mormon has changed the dialogue," Wadsworth said.
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