Mitt Buster?

Could Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith sink his chances of running for US President on the Republican Party ticket?

Eamonn McCann, 07 Dec 2011

Was Jesus born in Bethlehem?

The outcome of next year’s US presidential election could turn on this question – or at least the identity of the Republican candidate.

The main thing current front-runner Mitt Romney has going for him is that he can string two words together. His major minus is Mormonism.

“He does not believe that Jesus Christ was born on Earth to save our souls... I challenge how a Christian could campaign for Mr. Romney”, complains pastor Robert Jeffress of Dallas, Texas, on the Ye Shall Be My Witnesses website.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, on the other hand, has impeccable credentials as a Bible-believing Christian – and has shown that he, too, can string two words together. Problem is, he’d been aiming for three. In a TV debate on November 10, Perry, outlining his campaign pledge to “cut bloated Washington government down”, listed the “three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: commerce, education, and the, uh... What’s the third one, there?... Let’s see... The third one... I can’t... Oops.”

He might have blown the Christian credentials, too, had he tried enumerating the Trinity. “God the Father, God the Son and... uh... the third one... Oops.”

Perry has plummeted in the polls as a result of the televised faux pas. Which, for the time being, leaves Newt Gingrich as Romney’s main Bible-believing rival.

Last time he pitched for the presidency, Newt came a cropper after his former wife, Jackie Battley, previously his high-school geometry teacher and 15 years his senior, revealed that she’d woken from cancer surgery to find him hovering at the bedside with divorce papers for her to sign so he could marry a member of his security unit, Marianne Ginther, 15 years his junior, whom he’d been screwing throughout her illness.

But after a few years of re-marriage, it was, ‘So long, Marianne’. Failing to learn from Jackie’s mistake, Marianne fell ill, with multiple sclerosis, and was in Ohio to break the news to her mother in person when Newt phoned to confess he had been sleeping for the past six years with House of Representatives staffer Callista Bisek, 23 years his junior, and would like a divorce please.

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