Photo illo by Scott Dvorin

Grab any time machine you can find, take it back to any year from the founding of the Republican party until about 1970, and show the bios of this year’s GOP presidential ticket to the party leaders of the past. No doubt, their first response will be, “Weren’t there any Christians available?”

After all, the very first Republican party platform grouped the Mormons in with slaveholders, labeling polygamy and slavery “twin relics of barbarism” and calling for their eradication. President Lincoln later tried to do just that, signing into law the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which specifically outlawed polygamy in the frontier territories. Its sponsor, Congressman Justin Morrill, called the practice “a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world,” and likened it to “cannibalism or infanticide.”

And that’s nothing compared with what some Republicans used to say about Catholics.

This year marks the first time in the history of the Republic when a major party has not had a Protestant on the ticket. Indeed, the only Protestant left in the race is President Obama, who just four years ago was excoriated for the “fringe” views of his old pastor and religious mentor.

One would think that a candidate from a religion that has preached, say, that all Indians are the wicked and degenerate descendants of ancient Hebrew tribes would be reluctant to spark a culture war. But Mitt Romney went there the other day, pledging that if elected, he, for one, “will not take ‘God’ out of the name of our platform,” or “off our coins,” or “out of my heart.”

He somehow failed to elucidate that, according to Mormon doctrine, ‘God’ is a former man who lives somewhere near the planet Kolob. But never mind. I’m a big-tent Christian myself. About half of my relatives are Catholics, and some of the others are fundamentalist Protestants. I love them all dearly, including the one who told me that the Republican convention in Tampa was likely to be attacked by anarchists with “acid-filled eggs.” (Don’t bother to contemplate the logistics of that too closely. Let’s just say it reflects a strong inclination toward a belief in the miraculous.)

To me, the real story about religion in the campaign has much more to do with the struggle being waged within the Catholic Church.

Speaking before the Democratic convention was Sister Simone Campbell, one of the “Nuns on the Bus” who have toured the U.S. arguing that vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s proposed budget “failed a basic moral test, because it would hurt families living in poverty.” Sister Simone pointedly asserted of herself and her fellow nuns that, “We agree with our bishops” in condemning the Republicans’ favorite choirboy scamp.

Just this spring the Vatican’s conservative hierarchy decided to push U.S. nuns back into line, issuing a report accusing them of straying toward “radical feminist themes” and emphasizing social welfare causes over the church’s anti-abortion, anti-contraception priorities. Sister Simone shrewdly hauled the bishops’ liberal positions on poverty out into the convention spotlight—then went on to defy her bosses by explicitly endorsing the Affordable Care Act.

As head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, New York’s own Cardinal Timothy Dolan has led the fight to amend the act, insisting that allowing the employees of Catholic hospitals, schools and charities to choose a health-care plan that includes contraception—as the care act mandates—is tantamount to religious oppression in “China or North Korea.”

Cardinal Dolan, who it is said would very much like to be the first American pope, has also served as the Vatican’s point man against legalizing gay marriage, dismissing it as a “chic cause.” He has fought against removing the statutes of limitations on child abuse, paid off pedophile priests in his old archdiocese in Milwaukee to leave the clergy (Dolan insists on characterizing these payments as “charity”) and approvingly reprinted a column from longtime Catholic League wacko William Donohue denouncing SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, as “a phony victims’ group.”

On Cardinal Dolan’s watch, the conference of bishops also issued its notorious, 2011 “Blame it on Woodstock” report, which concluded that, among other things, “The rise of abuse cases [by priests] in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in society generally …”—confirming theories long held by the bishops themselves and by Pope Benedict XVI.

Whatever the excesses of the ’60s, few would argue that they included an endorsement of child rape. And even if they had, since when did the wayward teenager’s excuse, “Everyone was doin’ it,” come to serve as absolution from the age-old Christian concept of personal responsibility? For that matter, the report also claims that most of the abusive priests could not even be considered true pedophiles under the official psychiatric definition, because most of their victims were under 13 years of age … but not under 10.

The report was compiled under the aegis of Dr. Karen Terry, the Cambridge-educated Ph.D. who is the interim dean of research and strategic services at John Jay College, part of the CUNY system. Dr. Terry has since tried to walk back the controversy her investigation ignited, insisting upon her own objectivity. But there’s no getting around the fact that her data was supplied by the church itself, or the damning conflict of interest observable on her John Jay website, which lists all of the funding sources for her reports.

This site puts the total cost of the “Woodstock” job at more than $1.9 million—of which $1 million came directly from the conference of bishops, and almost $500,000 more came from various Catholic charities and foundations. Indeed, of the total amount of almost $3.5 million that Dr. Terry claims to have received in funding to date—primarily for studies of sexual abuse—over $1.5 million came from the conference of bishops and over $2 million from all Catholic sources.

What we seem to have here, in other words, is a publicly funded university operating a cozy little “academia-for-hire” sideline, in which the client provides his own data and his own funding. Belief in Dr. Terry’s objectivity under such circumstances strains my faith to the breaking point.

But Cardinal Dolan’s ability to wrangle the results he wants out of politicians and academics alike continues to impress. Running for pope is an intricate business, infinitely trickier than trying to be a mere president. The cardinal trumped Sister Simone by delivering benedictions at both the Republic and the Democratic conventions, pointedly praising freedom of religion and asking God’s blessing on “those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and protected.”

No one was offended, the bishops’ message was delivered, and the nuns got back on the bus. Another day on the campaign trail.

(Photoillo by Scott Dvorin)

The blue-collar success stories piled up so fast at the Republican Convention in Tampa that one would have been forgiven for assuming that the party was made up entirely of the sons and daughters of garage mechanics, fruit pickers and removers of rotting animal carcasses from the nation’s highways.

Over and over again, speakers informed us of how they came from families of hard-working strivers, with parents who fought their way up from nothing. Such tales were almost de rigueur, especially if they involved “starting a small business.”

Before telling us how little girls now approach her with reverence and awe, Susana Martinez, the runaway egomaniac who is the governor of New Mexico, informed us that her mother and father started their security guard business by handing her—then an 18-year-old girl—a “Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum,” and posting her in the parking lot of a church during bingo games. There are those who might assume that this accounts for Ms. Martinez’s decision, as a prosecutor, to specialize in child abuse, but never mind.

Rick Santorum told us that he was a first-generation American and the grandson of a coal miner. (He didn’t mention that he was also the son of a clinical psychologist and an administrative nurse.) John Boehner told us he was “a regular guy with a big job,” whose father and uncles had first put him to work “mopping floors, waiting tables” at the bar they owned. Paul Ryan assured us that when he “was waiting tables, washing dishes or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life.” No doubt, that optimism was at least partly inspired by the trust fund he would inherit, thanks to his family’s enormously successful construction company (founded in 1884), and confirmed by his marriage to his millionaire wife, a Washington lobbyist and scion of a family of wealthy trial lawyers—not exactly the social familiar of your average dishwasher or lawn boy.

By the time Marco Rubio told us on the last night of the convention that his father “stood behind a bar in the back of the room all those years, so one day I could stand behind a podium in the front of a room,” this trope had reached the level of self-parody.

What could be next? “My father played piano in a whorehouse, so I could play on the stage at Carnegie Hall?” “My mother scraped gum off the sidewalk, so one day I could scrape the Iranian mullahs’ fingers off their nuclear-enrichment cyclotrons?”

Tim Pawlenty made sure to tell us that he was the only one of the five kids in his family to go to college, about the sweetest personal anecdote told by a Republican since the days when Supreme Court aspirant Clarence Thomas used to go around the country regaling audiences with tales of what a lazy no-account his sister was.

All this poor-mouthing of origins, family finances and siblings served a dual purpose, as both a reaffirmation of rugged, Republican individualism, and to support the convention talking point that the press and the Democrats must stop seeking to “demonize success” in general, and that great “businessman,” Mitt Romney, in particular ... with their demands that he release his tax returns.

Before the convention was over, Mr. Romney had been transformed—in his own words—into the son of a Mexican immigrant, whose family were “war refugees” from the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17, and who “never made it through college and apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter,” before becoming the head of a great automobile company and governor of Michigan.

In fact, Mr. Romney’s family had fled to Mexico from the territorial U.S. to avoid federal prosecution of the Mormon practice of polygamy. (The Mormon “Mexico colonies,” as they were called, were uprooted following the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz by local rebels who had bought their weapons in the U.S.) George Romney was indeed a remarkable man, almost a great one, but he was already an affluent auto executive by the time Mitt was born—able to provide his newborn son with “a few thousand dollars” in birthday gifts, according to Mitt’s wife, Ann.

This money was in turn invested by George in American Motors stock, which, under his dynamic leadership and that old-timey liberal prosperity thing, increased exponentially in value. Earlier in the convention, Ann had described her early married years with Mitt as a time when they ate “tuna fish and pasta” off an ironing board pressed into service as a table, and had to walk to graduate school classes. (The horror. The horror.) But if you believe her earlier accounts of the nest egg George had hatched for his son, they were scraping by on at least several hundred thousand 1969 dollars-worth of investment windfall.

Even by the standards of political bio exaggeration, all this comes off as a rather nervy piece of family revisionism, but never mind. The bigger issue here is that nobody in the Republican party seems to remember what a good job or a true businessman is anymore.

Almost all work is noble, of course, but not all of it is ennobling, and not all of it brings any multiplying or lasting value to an economy, a society or a family. The ambitions of Susana Martinez’s hardworking parents are nothing to mock, but hiring a teenaged girl to tote a .357 Magnum around the parking lot of a bingo game reflects the increasing desperation of the American working class, more than it does the traditional American dream. So is shoveling liquor into drunks, then making your kid clean up around the place. One does what one has to in this world, but the reality that those of us who don’t have that trust fund or “a few thousand” shares of prime stock awaiting their maturity are indeed more and more likely to be stuck mopping floors and waiting tables seems lost on this party. For Republicans, manual labor has become a weird sort of fetish, like Marie Antoinette’s fake pastoral village at Versailles, where she could play at running a working farm before returning to her glittering palace.

For that matter, Mitt Romney himself was hardly a “businessman” in the tradition of his father. He was, at best, a “venture capitalist,” at worst a “leveraged buyout artist”—and it’s not clear that, in a career of endlessly chopping up and restitching existing companies, he really created any net jobs at all, much less invented, produced or marketed anything. In the incredibly lazy, outdated hack job that is his campaign biography, No Apologies, Mitt makes his greatest success story—backing the expansion of Staples—as momentous as Andrew Carnegie developing a process for the mass production of steel.

Sorry, but putting some of your vast inherited wealth behind a company that has found a way to distribute office supplies more cheaply is not the same thing as, say, running Chrysler. Republicans are trying to make the case that Mr. Romney’s vaunted business experience will save the country. Unfortunately, what he has told us of his plans seems all too likely to reflect that experience. That is, taking apart and selling off the majestic constructions of our past.

Kevin Baker is covering the conventions and the election for harpers.org.

Sarah Palin won't get to talk about John McCain tonight. (Facebook)

Well, at least she can't claim it was a liberal news bias this time: Fox News contributor Sarah Palin took to Facebook today to kvetch about being bumped from the interviews (plural?) she was slated to give tonight about her BFF, John McCain. Whose birthday it is, apparently.


Okay, let's be honest: it is weird that Sarah Palin isn't going to be on Fox tonight, seeing as it's Paul Ryan's speaking engagement at the RNC. The former VP candidate weighing in on the next conservative to run for the spot?

Either way, one thing we do know is that it's not a good idea to send pouty little messages like that out on Facebook. We expect this to blow up in five ... four ... three ...

Democrat Cat (YouTube)

Come on, Democrats! The Republicans are totally kicking your ass right now in terms of absurd viral content. Sure, we know there's a lot more cringe-inducing material for them to choose from, as the Tampa convention has already started. But for every Karl Rove James Carville impression, or politicians Tweeting pics with Jon Voight, you guys need to be up there with promoting next week's CarolinaFest ...

Wait, is the DNC actually called CarolinaFest? Never mind, you guys just won it. James Taylor is playing? Perfect.
http://youtu.be/iK4QypS6bxE
This very lazy attempt to cash in on the internet's love of cats and the tourist attractions of Charlotte, N.C. (Side question: Was that Bank of America shot supposed to be ironic?) is just icing on the liberal cake.

Which is also shaped like a cat.

Karl Rove is great at impressions (Buzzfeed)

Case in point: who knew that Karl Rove, former political strategist to President George W. Bush, was so good* at impressions? During today's live interview with Politico's Mike Allen, Mr. Rove did his best Ragin' Cajun voice, which could give Saturday Night Live's Bill Hader's James Carville routine a run for its money.

Karl Rove as Carville, whom he is besties with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MovOe-bSpiU#!

Very subtle. "Bleh bleh bleh! Ableh bleh bleh!" It sounds like a middle schooler's impression of the teacher who just gave them detention for blowing spitballs at nerds.

Bill Hader:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-HQvutGFsQ

It might be more accurate, but come on, you know Mr. Rove nailed it. Maybe he can break his contract at Fox and start doing work for Lorne Michaels.

*Terrible

Mehlman also addressed his place in a Republican Party that has in recent years ramped up anti-gay measures: "I can't change the fact that I wasn't in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that."

Mehlman has made quiet, apparently sincere efforts to work in favor of causes the party he once headed still opposes:

Chad Griffin, the California-based political strategist who organized opposition to Proposition 8, said that Mehlman's quiet contributions to the American Foundation for Equal Rights are "tremendous," adding that "when we achieve equal equality, he will be one of the people to thank for it." Mehlman has become a de facto strategist for the group, and he has opened up his rolodex -- recruiting, as co-hosts for the AFER fundraiser: Paul Singer, a major Republican donor, hedge fund executive, and the president of the Manhattan Institute; Benjamin Ginsberg, one of the GOP's top lawyers; Michael Toner, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission; and two former GOP governors, William Weld of Massachusetts and Christie Todd Whitman of New Jersey.

Mehlman now lives in what Ambinder calls the "gay Mecca" of Chelsea  but past admitting his homosexuality, he refused to discuss his personal life.

Another former head of the RNC, Ed Gillespie, said that in spite of Mehlman's admission and pro-gay sentiments expressed by other leading Republicans, he does not foresee any changes in the current Republican Party platform where policies affecting homosexuals are concerned.

[The Atlantic]

The Republican North Country congressman resigned from the seat last month to become Secretary of the Army under Barack Obama. According to the most recent quarterly filing, McHugh has $142,063 on hand.

"The Committee will be inactive except for administrative expenses related to bookkeeping and reporting.," Lisa Lisker, the campaign treasurer, wrote in an e-mail. "Quarterly reports will continue to be filed with the Federal Election Commission."

Activity has already slowed. In the last quarter, McHugh's campaign spending was administrative except for refunding a $3,000 to the John Deere PAC. He received only one $500 contribution from John Simmons.

Typically, federal candidates leaving office (most are assuming that McHugh, who just turned 61, will not seek another elected office when his gig as Army Secretary is up) distribute their campaign funds to charities or candidate committees. Large transfers are often given to national or state party committees, because there is no expenditure limit.

Not so McHugh. He's in an awkward place serving as a Republican in a Democratic administration, and some lawyers said there might be ethical constraints governing his expenditures as an administration official.

Republicans could certainly use that money. There's a three-way race underway to replace McHugh, and Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, the Republican nominee, has had a lot of trouble raising money. (Official numbers will be filed Thursday.) The Republican National Committee has had to commit its own resources to the race.

Still, all signs point to Republicans--facing attacks on both the left and right--will be outspent significantly.

Today, the RNC's subcommittee on law enforcement and public safety affairs sent out an advisory to journalists noting that while the police in St. Paul support the First Amendment, sometimes in the fog of protests it can be difficult to differentiate between unlawful, vandalizing anarchists and the inkstained wretches lawfully reporting on them.

Until such things get sorted out, the subcommittee helpfully suggests, it's best for the reporters to disperse quickly--just like everyone else!-- when told to by authorities.

"Because still cameras, video cameras and other recording equipment are commonplace at large events or gatherings, it can be difficult for law enforcement and others to differentiate between credentialed media, un-credentialed media or others who may carry similar equipment," notes the subcommittee's release. "While law enforcement in no way wishes to restrict First Amendment rights, members of the press must also follow police orders to protect their safety, the safety of police and others."

"When police officials request the breakup of an unlawful assembly by announcement to the gathered crowd, that order applies to all individuals, including the media," adds the release. "A quick and orderly dispersal is more likely to help people, including media personnel, stay safe and avoid arrest."