Last week, I was talking to an unorthodox Mormon friend about his strained relationship with his sixty-something, highly observant LDS father.
My friend described a brief, tension-laden phone call between father and son, wedged into a few free minutes after a church meeting. “Now, I’m going to serve my family,” said the father, bringing the call to a close. “Because that’s what I do.”
And Mitt Romney is going to serve his country. Because that’s what he does. Like it or not.
That joyless put-your-shoulder-to-the-wheel tenacity is setting the tone for the GOP primaries.
Onward grinds the contest, protracted unnaturally by super PAC money, and delivering few surprises: Romney continues to win the Northeast and West, Santorum the Bible Belt. Ohio turned out just about the way the best prognosticators in the game predicted.
There’s been nothing so dramatic to punch up the storyline as the anti-Mormon flare-ups we witnessed late last summer and fall. In fact, while evangelical Christians continue to opt for Santorum as the not-Romney, there is little solid data that isolates anti-Mormonism as the cause: region, social conservatism, and economic class also drive the narrative.
As the race moves past Super Tuesday, the real story is the grind that the 2012 race is becoming. Its dispiriting effects on voters. The distorting effects of Super PAC cash. And the fact that we’re in it for the long haul. Like it, or not.
