The Speech

Want to know why Mitt Romeny is giving his JFK-esque Mormon speech?

Just look at these numbers.

The news with this Pew Poll is that there is no news. These numbers haven't really changed from numbers that have been published over the course of much of the last year or so and that's a big problem. Voters seem to have favorabilities of Mormons that hoover in the 50% range. That's also the percentage of people that appear to know what Mormonism is. And it's kind of close to the "liability" line for the religion.

In other words, there's a lot of Americans out there that really don't know what Mormonism is. That means there a gaping hole of ignorance out there among the voting populace, and when one of those exists it's almost always filled with rumors, fantasies, and outright untruths.

One of the things that I expected to see from the LDS Church over the course of the last year was a kind of Mormon marketing campaign not based on proselytizing, but based around public relations. I didn't expect this to be part of Romney's campaign, but I did think the church might see Romney's run as an opportune time to put its best foot forward in front of the American public.

That didn't happen and as the Pew number show Americans still don't seem to know a lot about Mormonism, likely to Romney's detriment.