America has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians

America has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians

This campaign season has been in desperate need of its own reincarnation of Howard Beale from "Network": a TV talking head who would get mad as hell and not take it anymore. That prayer was answered when Lawrence O'Donnell, an excitable Democratic analyst, seized a YouTube moment while appearing on one of the Beltway's more repellent Sunday bloviathons, "The McLaughlin Group."

Pushed over the edge by his peers' polite chatter about Mitt Romney's sermon on "Faith in America," O'Donnell branded the speech "the worst" of his lifetime. Then he went on a rampage about Romney's Mormon religion, shouting (among other things) that until 1978 it was "an officially racist faith."

That claim just happens to be true. As the jaws of his scandalized co-stars dropped around him, O'Donnell then raised the rude question that almost no one in Washington asks aloud: Why didn't Romney publicly renounce his church's discriminatory practices before they were revoked? As the scion of one of America's most prominent Mormon families, he might have made a difference. It's not as if he was a toddler. By 1978 -- the same year his contemporary, Bill Clinton, was elected governor in Arkansas -- Romney had entered his 30s.

The answer is simple. Romney didn't fight his church's institutionalized apartheid, whatever his private misgivings, because that's his character. Though he is trying to sell himself as a leader, he is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his flip-flops on nearly every issue.