Clinton speaks Mormon while Trump speaks nonsense

Eight hundred and one words in the Deseret News, Utah’s Mormon-owned newspaper, show the difference between a competent, respectful campaign and whatever Donald Trump is running.

In an op-ed published Wednesday, Hillary Clinton extended a hand to one of the most Republican voting blocs in the country — members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — as part of an audacious strategy to make inroads into some of the reddest states in the country. Her piece reflects a basic difference between her and her opponent. Clinton assumes everyone has interests and preferences that must be acknowledged and, hopefully, reconciled. Trump assumes everyone is shallow and manipulable.

Turns out she — or someone on her staff — speaks Mormon pretty well. It’s easy for non-members to get LDS lingo wrong. Mormons have wards, not parishes, sacrament meeting, not mass, stakes, not dioceses. Even non-members who should know better often have trouble, as when, in an early episode of HBO’s Big Love, Harry Dean Stanton mispronounces “Palmyra,” Joseph Smith’s home town in upstate New York.

Clinton recognized and handled the challenge well. “We know that it so often takes a village — or a ward — working together to build the change we hope to see,” Clinton wrote (emphasis mine). She included a requisite reference to Mitt Romney. She also wrote of “generations of LDS leaders, from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to Gordon Hinckley and Thomas Monson.” Monson is the current LDS president, but no one has defined modern institutional Mormonism more than Hinckley, particularly for members of my generation — I was raised Mormon in the 1980s and 1990s. And, in a clever twist, Clinton quoted Sister Rosemary M. Wixom, who just finished a six-year stint as the general president of the Primary, the LDS children’s organization. Clinton included a female voice in a way that was not threatening to traditionalist Mormons, who generally disfavor giving women a large and meaningful role in the church hierarchy. Her biggest mistake is omitting the middle initials normally included in Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson’s names. Removing them preserved the parallelism with Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, but it was still jarring.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/08/11/clinton-speaks-mormon-while-trump-speaks-nonsense/