Sunday, August 31, 2008
Opinion

The running mate gamble

I wanted John McCain to choose Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal as his running mate...

By Stephanie Ramage

I wanted John McCain to choose Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal as his running mate, but Jindal said in July that he has no interest in leaving Louisiana. So, as I write this, the night before McCain is expected to pick a vice presidential candidate, I am gambling on his choice being Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. Choosing either one would virtually insure that the GOP loses the White House.

The veep pick’s second greatest importance lies in its ability to generate votes. In that respect, Romney would/will bring nothing to the McCain ticket. McCain could pick Bigfoot—who at least has more credibility than Democrat Barack Obama’s vice presidential pick, Lyin’ Joe Biden—and the religious right-wingers still wouldn’t stay home from the polls, not with Barack Hussein Obama to defeat. So, McCain has the freedom to choose someone based on the most important role of the vice president: an alternate in the event that something untoward happens to the president.

Never before has that role been so crucial. McCain is 72, only six years older than Biden. And though no one’s talking about Biden’s age or his unfortunate medical history—two brain aneurysms—everyone insists that McCain could kick off any second. Obama presents another kind of risk for tragedy that I don’t even want to go into. Suffice it to say that racism may well be a vanishing ill in American society, but some of its remaining practitioners are as deranged and dangerous as ever. Having Biden poised to take over for Obama gives me the willies.

Conversely, whenever I think about Mormon Romney being one heartbeat away from a McCain presidency, I am reminded that most people have a warm and cuddly image of Mormonism that belies the religion’s hard edge. The Book of Mormon itself begins with God telling Nephi to kill a man named Laban in cold blood in order to rob him of a record of Israelite history: “Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.” (Nephi 4:13)

I’m a third generation Mormon—well, former Mormon—on my mother’s side, and I attended Brigham Young University my freshman year. Many Mormons are wonderful people, and I would fight for their right to worship as they choose just as I would for anyone else’s, but Mormonism infuses American exceptionalism with a toxic dose of God-given supremacy. More than anything, Mormonism is a doctrine of theocracy.

I don’t like Tim Pawlenty, not because of his religion, but because of his political use of it. Pawlenty left Catholicism to join Leith Anderson’s evangelical mega-church, a move that smacks of arbitrary faith and political expediency.

Deists like me, people who believe in God but aren’t big on church—a group that I think makes up the majority of Americans, whatever polls might say to the contrary—could take some comfort in Joe Lieberman or even Tom Ridge being vice president. But given their support for abortion rights and the overblown influence of the religious right, it’s unlikely McCain would select either one. The problem is that when people are polled about their religious affiliation, they tend to respond by naming the church in which they were raised, or a close approximation; there usually isn’t a box to check next to “I used to be…”

Consequently, secular conservatives have once more been left out in the cold by a party that has systematically attempted to force McCain to conform to the wishes of the religious right. Too late, I fear, the GOP will learn the power of irreligious independents, the group who, after all, boosted McCain ahead in the Feb. 5 primaries.

I hope I’m wrong. But I’m guessing that by the time you read this, McCain will have picked Romney, and I will have tilted back one of several decidedly un-Mormon drinks. SP

Editor's note: This column was written on Thursday evening, Aug. 28, as The Sunday Paper went to press. For Stephanie Ramage's reaction to McCain's VIP pick, please see the Staff Blog elsewhere on this site.