Kathryn Lofton argues that Mitt Romney didn't cast himself enough as a Mormon candidate, refusing "to reveal the man behind the Power Point":
In the end, the most potent secret is the one advertised, but not revealed. And Romney’s mistake has been to avoid explaining the most open secret of his leadership,
namely just how Mormon he is. He ought to have unveiled the relationship between his particular religious sensibility and his ideas for American success. He should have announced at every pit stop that he had met the world through his missionary work; that he came from a good Christian home that emphasized the principles of hard work and self-sacrifice; that he keeps a weekly calendar guided by the principles of Stephen R. Covey; and keeps a marriage because he believes those commercials are right—diamonds are forever, and so is this bond.
He should have proclaimed his financial success was the result of all this earnestness, and explained private equity as just another way to organize free enterprise. Not because it’s a crafty re-framing of his biography, but because it is also true: it’s true to the very thing his supporters find so solid, and his detractors find so discomfiting, about Romney.
If he had cast himself as such a pioneer Mormon, he would have established an image that would have worked both sides of the aisle against one another, capitalizing on the Reagan cowboy motif while also owning the terms of his inevitable satire. The pioneer Mormon is an eager stranger in a strange land, a missionary naïf in a world of heathen Gentiles and decadent cosmopolitans. This is the missionary depicted in the works of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who satirize Mormon resilience and, in doing so, also admiringly depict it. The pioneer Mormon is reliable in pop culture as a naively stalwart, and almost always inadvertently gallant, hero; which is exactly the kind of unwitting character that can overtake an incumbent.
Stephen R. Covey?
(Photo: US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his wife Ann arrive at the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints in Boca Raton, Florida, October 21, 2012. By Emmanuel Dunand/Getty.)
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