Front Row: Romney's JFK moment?

by Michael Tackett

Mitt Romney keeps trying to say he is not trying to recreate a John F. Kennedy moment.

Which, of course, is precisely what he is trying to do.

When Romney, a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, takes the stage of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, Thursday to discuss his Mormon faith, the comparisons will be obvious.

He has a major challenge on two fronts. One is to try to explain the substantive issue of his religion and how it affects his public decisions. The other is to attempt to match the poetry of that speech and the power of JFK's delivery.

Romney, known for his meticulous preparation, has surely surely he has read Kennedy's speech, delivered on Sept. 12, 1960, or perhaps listened to it on the Kennedy Library website.

Reading the speech or listening to it would have been a humbling experience.

In the ballroom of Houston's Rice Hotel, Kennedy addressed the issue of his Catholicism in a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association about two months before the general election.

Although there had been a Catholic candidate for president before, Al Smith in 1928, there had never been one with such a great chance of winning as the charismatic senator from Massachusetts. But many voters, particularly in the South, were concerned that Kennedy might be taking his orders from the Vatican rather than the Founding Fathers, so his campaign was forced to address his religion.

Now Romney faces perhaps an even greater challenge. And not simply because his is no match for Kennedy's oratory. Mormonism is not nearly as well understood by most Americans as Catholicism. And the critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are far more numerous, with qualms that go well beyond theology.

Already, there have been instances of negative push polling in New Hampshire, where anonymous callers reach out to local voters and try to demonize Romney for his faith.

The chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, a fan of Romney's considerable political skills, pointedly noted in a recent CNN interview that Romney would easily be leading in the Palmetto State if not for being a Mormon.

Kennedy called it "the so-called religious issue." And he used that night in Houston to defuse it, a moment that some believe helped ensure his narrow victory over Richard Nixon.

Kennedy came at the issue as a matter of separation of church in state, with the need for candidates to sometimes suspend matters of their faith if they conflicted with the national interest. Nearly half a century later, a candidate's faith is now in many ways central to how a candidate presents his or her biography to voters.

He began by laying out the many issues of the day that he argued were far more pressing than one's religion: "the spread of Communist influence, until now it festers only 90 miles from the coast of Florida -the humiliating treatment of our President and Vice President by those who no longer respect our power - the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills, the families forced to give up their farms - an America with too many slums, with too few schools and too late to the moon and outer space.

"These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues - for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barrier."

Because Kennedy's faith had become an issue, he said "So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again - not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me - but in what kind of America I believe in."

He said that no Catholic prelate should tell a president how to act just as no minister should tell his congregation how to vote, and that no public official should take policy dictates from the pope. He said he believed in an America "where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."

It was a speech that was muscular and unapologetic, yet also persuasive. He talked about putting his life on the line in during World War II and the death of his brother, Joe, in the same conflict. He stood by his faith at the same time he said that his faith would never override the national interest.

It also conveyed a hope for the future. "I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end, where all men and all churches are treated as equals."

Romney's candidacy will be a test in many ways of whether that day has come.

Michael Tackett is the Washington Bureau Chief for the Chicago Tribune. He has covered every presidential election since 1988 and served as the Tribune's chief political writer during the 1996 and 2000 campaigns. He also served as National Editor for U.S. News and World Report. And, don't hold this against him, he has a law degree.