ShareThisSALT LAKE CITY - For the past 167 years, Mormon candidates for U.S. president have suffered a parade of spectacular failures -- often, but not always, related to public distrust of their religion.
This year two Mormons -- Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman Jr. -- are wagering on overcoming that historical handicap as they battle the field to be the Republican presidential candidate for 2012.
But attacks on Mormonism helped to derail the six Mormons who have waged significant campaigns for president -- including Mitt Romney in 2008 -- assisted by some unfortunate foul-ups and ineffective campaign strategy.
This campaign season, Romney is already confronting the "Mormon question," after a prominent Texas Baptist preacher recently characterized Romney's religion as a "cult."
All six Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints candidates attempted to deal with the question in different ways. Here's a look at Mormon presidential candidates from the past:
-- Joseph Smith. Not only was he the first Mormon presidential candidate, he was the first Mormon. He taught that Jesus Christ restored his church through him as a modern prophet.
Smith ran for president in 1844 largely to fight persecution that his church suffered as it was driven from state to state. Leaders at Mormon headquarters in Nauvoo, Ill., passed a resolution endorsing Smith as a candidate on Jan. 29, 1844.
The late historian Richard Poll wrote that Smith came up with a unique campaign strategy: calling for volunteer missionaries to visit every state, as Smith said, to "advocate the Mormon religion, purity of elections and to call upon the people to stand by the law and put down mobocracy." He vowed to "protect the people in their rights and liberties."
Despite the dispatch of missionaries, including 10 of the church's 12 apostles, to every state, persecution in Illinois intensified. It led to the murder of Smith by a mob in June 1844. Mormons were forced out of Illinois in 1846 and migrated to remote Utah.
-- George Romney. The father of Mitt Romney was governor of Michigan and former head of American Motors when he became the GOP front-runner in the early part of the 1968 race.
It was almost seven years after Kennedy proved a Catholic could become president, arguing that his religion did not control him and should not matter. But questions still arose about Romney's religion and whether it made him a racist because the LDS Church, at the time, did not ordain blacks to its all-male priesthood.
Life magazine reported that Romney told a ministerial association: "If my church prevented me as a public official from doing those things for social justice that I thought right, I would quit the church. But it does not."
Romney told U.S. News and World Report, "My church teaches me the Negro is my brother, and that the Negro can attain the celestial kingdom (heaven), just as I can."
But he made a statement Aug. 31, 1967, that most historians and journalists say doomed his campaign -- and it had nothing to do with being a Mormon.
When asked why he was changing his earlier strong support for the Vietnam War, he said, "When I came back from Vietnam (in November 1965), I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get." He later decided he had been misled about the need for the war.
Time magazine said that was "so inept an explanation of his shifting views on Vietnam that it could end his presidential ambitions."
Romney withdrew from the race on Feb. 28, 1968.
-- Morris Udall. He was a witty, liberal Democratic congressman from Arizona and a former pro basketball player. He had not been active in the LDS Church since he was a teenager, but the question of blacks and the LDS priesthood hurt him anyway.
Udall had finished a close second in a string of primaries in 1976. But he was gaining ground on Jimmy Carter in Michigan, which was seen as a chance for Udall to break through with a win to maybe stop Carter's momentum.
But Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, a black who was a Carter supporter, told a gathering of black Baptist ministers that while Carter had tried to open the front doors of the church to blacks, Udall's church "won't even let you in the back door."
Udall biographers Donald W. Carson and James W. Johnson wrote that Udall responded by saying that "he had split with the Mormon Church over its policies toward blacks 30 years earlier. Udall called for Young to apologize and for Carter to repudiate the accusation. Neither did."
Udall lost the Michigan primary by three-tenths of a percentage point and Carter went on to ultimate victory. Udall finished a distant second at the Democratic Convention.
-- Bo Gritz. He was an outspoken, colorful former Green Beret colonel and a recent LDS convert living in Nevada when he became the Populist Party's nominee in 1992.
As a third-party candidate, he never had a serious chance of winning. Being LDS probably helped him, as fellow Mormons assisted him in gaining more presidential votes in a general election than any Mormon ever has -- mostly because all other major LDS presidential candidates past and present were defeated early in fights for major-party nominations.
Gritz gained national attention by helping negotiate an end to an 11-day standoff in at Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho between federal agents and white separatist Randy Weaver. He called for opposing "The New World Order," ending all foreign aid, abolishing the income tax and ending the Federal Reserve System. He said the country's laws "should reflect unashamed acceptance of Almighty God and his laws."
Gritz received about 100,000 votes nationally, about 1 percent of the vote. But in heavily LDS Utah, he received 3.8 percent of the vote, and in Idaho 2.1 percent.
-- Orrin Hatch. The Utah GOP senator had plenty of problems besides the "Mormon question." He was never considered a top contender by the press because he entered the 2000 race so late that almost all financial support and endorsements already had been snagged by other candidates.
Still, the question arose of whether a Mormon could be competitive. Hatch confronted it by giving his own "JFK-style" speech to a meeting of the Christian Coalition in Washington, D.C.
Hatch said, "I thought we got rid of that kind (of thinking) when John F. Kennedy ran for president of the United States as a Catholic," which brought some gasps and scattered applause.
"I know that Jesus is the Christ. I know that he lives. I know that he died for you and me. ... God bless America, and God bless all of you," Hatch said, and received an enthusiastic ovation.
But it did not help his moribund candidacy. Hatch finished dead last in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and dropped out.
-- Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor and chief of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah faced questions about his religion, fueled partly by some shenanigans by other GOP candidates.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, for example, said in a New York Times Magazine interview, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"
Huckabee apologized. But Romney said in response on the "Today" show that "attacking someone's religion is really going too far. ... It's just not the American way, and I think people will reject that."
Romney gave his own "Kennedy-style speech" to address religion at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and was introduced by that former president.
"Almost 50 years ago another candidate from Massachusetts explained that he was an American running for president, not a Catholic running for president. Like him, I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith," Romney said.
A national Gallup poll conducted shortly after Romney's 2008 speech showed that one of every six Americans still said they would not vote for their party's nominee if he or she were a Mormon.
Romney won 11 state primaries or caucuses, but dropped out of the race two days after the Super Tuesday primaries when wins by McCain made it virtually impossible for Romney to secure the GOP nomination.
A June Gallup poll showed almost a quarter of Americans are not yet comfortable with the idea of a Mormon president. About 22 percent said they were decidedly cool to the idea -- a percentage figure largely unchanged since 1967 polls.
(Contact reporter Lee Davidson at ldavidson(at)sltrib.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit Salt Lake Tribune
