McCain refused to engage on the subject of the Romney speech when we grilled him this morning. Though his staff has a barely contained loathing for the man (one aide regularly refers to him as “Damien”), McCain is dispassionate. Asked what he thought of Mormonism, he segued into a familiar anecdote about his mentor, Mo Udall, who was “a jack Mormon.” The only thing he knows about Mormonism, said McCain, was that “they believe the have a special responsibility to Native Americans.” Udall, he continued, had done more for Native Americans in Congress than any other politician he knew of.
He was scanning a new Romney immigration mailer as he spoke to us; its front page showed a barbed wire fence, and it unfolded to attacks on the immigration positions of McCain, Giuliani, and Thompson. We asked what he thought of it. Policy got him animated: “It says I’m for a guest worker program. Of course I’m for a guest worker program!”
But at the moment, we’re at the Timberland company headquarters, where McCain is giving a town hall on the environment and national service. The building is gorgeous and intimidating in the way it presents eco-friendly living and business as effortless and as hip as a catalog. It has a slightly rusty steel and bamboo laminate theme, and windows and skylights galore. There are displays of the recycled materials that the company uses to make bags, coats, and boots. There are kiosks for signing up for volunteer work. There are signs in the cafeteria reminding employees to get water out of a fountain rather than drink from a plastic bottle.
Amid all these reminders to leave a small footprint on the earth, there is the company store. The press contingent and staffers trooped in, and for awhile, we just watched McCain try on boots. Then one of the clerks told us that everything in the store was available at 40 percent off of retail. Suddenly, McCain was of less interest.
As McCain left the store to go to his town hall in the company auditorium (after buying a pair of boots), staffers and reporters fingered scarves and solicited opinions about shoe styles and jackets: “Does this make me look fat?” At one point, a senior aide looked around and noticed that almost the entire contingent of campaign staff was in the store, looking for bargains. “Hey,” he called, “Who’s staffing the senator?” He was answered by the sound of people rifling through racks of parkas. “Eh, he’ll be okay,” someone responded, “All the press in here too, if he does something stupid, no one’ll be there to cover it.” (Timberland employees say this happens all the time. It’s a regular political stop; the owner is active in AmeriCorps and politics.)
Not all the press was in the store. There were a few in the hall (along with some of the staff), and, once they had made their purchases (a pair of chocolate brown knee-high lace-up boots and an ivory wool wrap), some us trundled back on the bus. We watched Romney give his “Mormon speech.” A couple of staffers watched too, offering up eye-rolls and peanut gallery reviews. This line, in particular, elicited guffaws:
Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it. But I think they underestimate the American people. Americans do not respect believers of convenience. Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.
They found that almost as darkly amusing as Romney’s invocation of “the faith of my fathers,” which just happens to be the title of McCain’s best-selling autobiography. And Romney’s fathers’ faith was a little different than his…
Romney’s regular invocation of how awesome religion/faith/belief in general is prompted a running joke: “except for Islam…. except for Islam… except for Islam…” His nod toward including Muslims in his list of how all religions are awesome (“the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims”) made us wonder if maybe Romney was opposed to having Muslims on his hypothetical cabinet not because of their numbers, but because he thinks they’re too busy praying to take the job.
Much time was spent analyzing whether or not Romney was nervous about the speech, just a bad speaker, or perhaps worried about what might happen next. He could have made Mormonism fair game. By essentially trying “out faith” Huckabee, he might invite attention to his religion from the very Evangelicals he hoped to court. Or he may have given the media a pass to ever ask him about it again.
Now McCain’s back on the bus, and we’re moving, but it’s relatively quiet for once. Reporters are bent over their laptops, most of them typing up stories much more serious than this one, while McCain reads aloud what might interest us from the MSNBC ticker.