Marty Chavez is out, and he has endorsed Tom Udall, leaving the Democratic Senate race in New Mexico to Tom Udall’s complete domination.  Meanwhile, Wilson and Pearce will tear each other apart for the next six months, and Udall will in all likelihood smash the Republican nominee.  The decisions of both Wilson and Pearce to run for Senate make less and less sense with each passing week, since it exposes New Mexico to the rather unwelcome possibility of having a 4-1 or 5-0 Democratic delegation after having enjoyed a 3-2 Republican majority for decades. 

P.S.  Tom Udall is Mo Udall’s nephew, in case you were wondering.  There would be a certain irony if two Udalls, one of whom is a Mormon, joined the Senate in the year that Romney lost in the primaries.  Interestingly, Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon and also a Mormon, is their cousin.  2008 will see the three cousins all running for Senate at the same time.  Ah, democracy.

Bob Wright and Ramesh Ponnuru were talking about Mormon-related matters on bloggingheads recently, and something Ponnuru said stood out (since I had just been looking at the Pew polling he referred to).  He mentioned a word association result and claimed that the poll showed that 75% of the public used the word polygamy to describe Mormonism.  This is not what the poll said.  The figure was 75, but it was the number of times the word polygamy was mentioned in free association out of a total of 1,461 responses.  I think there is still fairly widespread, residual association of Mormonism with polygamy, but I don’t think it’s anything like 75%.  In any case, whatever it is, the Pew results show something else.

P.S.  While I’m in fact-checking mode, Ponnuru said that Robertson won the 1988 Iowa caucuses (at 7:14), when it was Bob Dole who won and Robertson placed second.

With Huckabee moving up everywhere and Clinton remaining tied or in the lead pretty much everywhere despite some recent weakening, I had a horrifying vision of the future: the All-Arkansas election.  Imagine spending ten months arguing about Wayne Dumond and Whitewater (again) and ARKids vs. HillaryCare, and then having one of them win.  How has it come to this?  Is it alredy too late to repent for whatever it is that we have done that has brought this evil upon us?

So, as Romney tells it, he couldn’t control whether or not his landscaper hired illegal immigrants, which is why you need to vote for him so that he can push for enforcement!  If there hadn’t been a follow-up questioning his management competence, this would have been a moderately effective dodge.  It’s not a fully satisfactory answer, since the same company was engaged in these practices last year, as we all know.  Even so, the follow-up question seems a bit lame to me–the man has actually rehabilitated corporations and did put the Salt Lake City Olympics in the black, and we’re really going to question his judgement and doubt his competence as a manager because his landscaper has hired illegal immigrants?  Really?  Now if you want to make this about his utter inconsistency on immigration, be my guest.  That, however, is a matter of his policy record and his reputation as, as I have put it, an “opportunistic fraud.”

As far back as 1967, only three-quarters of Americans said they would vote for an otherwise well qualified person who was a Mormon.  This year – some 40 years later — the results to this question are almost exactly the same.  ~USA Today/Gallup Blog

This reminds me of the remark you hear all the time in commentary on this question: in the 1968 election, George Romney didn’t face this problem.  This is not true.  He did face this problem, but failed to gain any ground as a presidential candidate before there was that much time for the issue to become a prominent one.  We may forget, as we now enter the eleventh month of this election campaign (11 down, 11 to go!), that Romney started his campaign for the Republican nomination in November 1967 and by the end of February he was out.  He was a declared candidate for a little over four months.  He had made his famous “brainwashed” remark earlier in 1967 before becoming an avowedly antiwar candidate (an example his son has definitely not followed).  His son started organising the preliminary elements  of his presidential campaign in 2005, and there has been active speculation about his presidential run since mid-2006 at least.  There has been much more time to ponder the implications of this factor, much more time to do a lot of polling on it, and much more time for pundits and bloggers to write endless commentaries on the topic. 

The issue has taken on added significance in the nominating contest because evangelicals, many of whom would have been Democratic voters in 1967-68, have since started voting Republican much more frequently.  As a Republican candidate before the 1968 realignment, Romney would have been more insulated from the early pressures his son is now experiencing.  Had he been a Democrat, the issue might have become more significant in the nominating contest.  Others cite the famed presidential runs of Mo Udall and Orrin Hatch, both of which went precisely nowhere in the end.  Udall’s attempt was somewhat more successful, and even though Udall was also not an actively practicing Mormon his membership in the LDS church was used against him during the primaries.  Udall lost to Jimmy Carter, so the Carter-Huckabee comparisons have something else going for them.  Indeed, Udall’s defeat can provide some clue of what might have happened had Romney been running in the other party. 

The idea that modern anti-Mormonism has somehow come out of nowhere in recent years is a myth.

As if the Huckabee surge weren’t generally baffling enough, he has shot up to second place in Nevada, surpassing Giuliani, which appears to put him in real contention as of right now to win every caucus and primary in January except for Michigan, where Giuliani and Romney will be duking it out (with obvious organisational and local advantages for Romney).  According to the latest, he is also second in Florida, and he has now tied third place in California and tied second in Pennsylvania.  I don’t see how he can sustain this without funding, especially in the larger states, but what really makes no sense is how he is getting these levels of support in Nevada and California to start with.

With the new evidence that Romney is getting trounced in Iowa, Ambinder speculates that this helps deflate the expectations surrounding Romney’s performance in Iowa and ends up making his much more likely defeat there less embarrassing.  Well, maybe.  But what can it say about the candidate who has pitched himself as Mr. Social Conservative and now, after Thursday’s speech, would-be leader against the forces of godlessness that he has spent much of the last year and $7 million on his campaign in Iowa and still couldn’t close the deal with people who ought to be, if they believed what the man said about his newfound-yet-deep convictions, his natural constituency?  Romney’s lead in New Hampshire will be (and perhaps should be) discounted to some extent because he’s from Massachusetts and his has been a familiar name in New Hampshire for years thanks to the Boston media market.  Anything short of a dominant performance in New Hampshire will be interpreted as signs of impending collapse.  

In the last 20 years eventual GOP nominees win Iowa and South Carolina, but sometimes lose New Hampshire–it’s really not a good sign for Romney that he’s on track to do the opposite.  It’s fairly terrifying that Huckabee is currently in position to try to follow this path to the nomination, but that’s another story.  Still, there is something gratifying about this outcome.  Romney’s one definite political convictition–that money can buy political victory, no matter how unappealing or uninspiring the candidate–has apparently been rejected by Iowans.  Look at the graph of the RCP average for Iowa.  Since Romney peaked in September over 30%, it’s been all downhill.  The Romney and Huckabee lines follow each other in an eerie fashion until the end of September, which is when the current dynamic seems to have taken hold.  There is really no way to spin these trends in a pro-Romney direction.

Megan McArdle makes some of the right points in response to this.  I would add that totalitarian regimes have been perfectly willing to regulate sexuality in particular throughout the 20th century, and it was frequently the case that revolutionary communist forces were extremely demanding in their expectations of moral and ideological purity to the point of a secular asceticism.  There is a larger problem in the argument that theocracy is somehow inherently worse or more intrusive than totalitarianism, which is that historically theocratic governments ruled states that were not especially administratively effective, nor were they powerful enough to enforce their restrictions with the kind of thoroughgoing interference of the modern totalitarian state.  The idea that you don’t have to believe in the rules and doctrines of a totalitarian system seems to show a complete lack of awareness of the practices of indoctrination and denunciation that were certainly present in communist states.  The particularly terrifying thing about, say, a Stalinist regime was that the rules and doctrines would change from year to year and adherence to the old doctrines, which had been up until the day before perfectly acceptable and mandatory, became proof of deviationism.  At least with religious orthodoxies, whatever else you might think about them, they remain generally quite stable and fixed once they are set down.  Under Stalinism, you were expected to confess a party line that changed along with shifts in policy, and the longer you had been around the more evidence of your past deviation from the current line, whatever it happened to be, there would be.   

The post did remind me of something I have read before about the “alternative history” of the universe of The Golden Compass:

The conservative Protestant churches seem to have missed the part of Pullman’s alternative history where Calvinism was absorbed into Catholicism to create the corrupt Magisterium.

This is revealing of the author’s view of Christianity and the apparent absurdity of the world he has imagined, in which two utterly, starkly opposed confessions that are about as far apart from one another as possible somehow came together in common cause to become part of the same religious authority.  I should think that any Presbyterians who heard about this alternative history would be having so much difficulty stopping their spasms of laughter that they would not have the energy to register a protest.

“The Golden Compass” is a blatant attempt to duplicate the success of the “Harry Potter” franchise. The only thing missing is richly imagined characters, a comprehensible story line, good acting, and satisfying special effects. ~Peter Rainer

So, I take it that that’s a thumbs down.  I have been interested to read some reviews of The Golden Compass after commenting on this Atlantic article about it.  While it has received some good press, manyreviewers are saying that it is confusing and mediocre.  (The title has also provided easy fodder for mocking the film’s direction, or lack thereof.)  I wonder if the movie has so softened and dulled the ideas in the book (even if they are ideas that would have made the movie much less popular and lucrative), as the article suggested it did, that it lost whatever coherence it may have had as a novel.  The Chronicle‘s reviewer certainly thought this was the case:

It’s a story without a soul.

Perhaps materialists will take that as a compliment?