White Horse Mitt

Those afraid of a Mormon president should spend their fear on our current leader.
by Ben Fulton

f Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney were mulling a candidacy for leader of any other country in the world, his religion would be no big deal. But this is America, where not only the presidency, but religion itself, is a very big deal. In fact, mix the two together as American politicians are so prone to do and you’ve got a very big deal indeed.

Our current president mumbles something about talking to God, and gets teary in the eye about how Jesus helped him kick the sauce. Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and his wife, devout Catholics, are so pro-life that they slept a night at the hospital with their stillborn baby. Shortly after launching his 2000 presidential campaign, our own Sen. Orrin Hatch muttered something on a radio show about how the U.S. Constitution was “hanging by a thread.”

Ah, that beloved phrase “hanging by a thread.” It carries a long tradition among Mormons, but leaves the rest of us scratching our heads. And it will almost certainly re-surface once more now that Gov. Romney’s 2008 candidacy and, more importantly his PAC contributions, gain steam. Who didn’t sit up and take notice when Deseret Morning News reported last month that 45 percent of Romney’s expected campaign donations flew all the way from the Beehive State? And who didn’t shake their head knowingly when it was also reported that as many as 35 percent of registered American voters said they might not be able to stomach a Mormon president?

Upon sitting down to write this column, I was surprised about just how much I know about the man. On the plus side, I’ve heard many a Massachusetts Mormon girl describe his sons as “aesthetically pleasing,” everyone I’ve met who worked with him closely during the 2002 Winter Olympics had nothing but high praise for his managerial skills, and he’s already got hardcore conservatives riding his tail for mandating health insurance in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. On the negative side, hardcore conservatives also have a point when they say that subsidizing health care with everyone’s insurance policy will do nothing to control health-care costs. Then there’s the fact that every Bostonian I’ve talked to has said in no uncertain terms that they’re tired of Romney’s veiled complaints about liberals when it was liberals who put him in the governor’s seat to begin with. But hey, if you’re Republican and running for president, you’ve got to earn your props early on. So it is that Romney also has a thing against gay rights, and only a fool wouldn’t stop to notice that Deseret Book CEO Sheri Dew, who once compared gay rights to the ascendancy of Adolf Hitler, has contributed at least $3,000 to Romney’s campaign. You’d think a nice man like Romney would be a little more concerned about the company he keeps.

But let’s move on to this “hanging by a thread” phrase. In the interest of saying what Mormons themselves had to say about these mythic words, I consulted an article by one George Cobabe, “The White Horse Prophecy,” listed on the Web by the Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research. Mr. Cobabe deals with this “prophecy” at length, even right down to the journal entry of an early Saint who saw Joseph Smith drink a tall glass of cool water before pronouncing it: “You will go to the Rocky Mountains and you will be a great and mighty people established there, which I will call the White Horse of peace and safety. … Your enemies will continue to follow you with persecutions and they will make obnoxious laws against you in Congress to destroy the White Horse, but you will have a friend or two to defend you and throw out the worst parts of the law so they will not hurt you so much.”

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