Politics

Becoming Bobby Jindal

One of the nastiest campaign tricks in recent memory was the Louisiana Democratic Party’s attempt to derail the candidacy of Roman Catholic Bobby Jindal by quoting — out of context — statements he’d written about Protestantism. The thing I remember about the attacks is that Jindal seemed surprisingly theologically literate for a politician. Jindal explained his adult conversion from Hinduism in the New Oxford Review and the Democratic Party quoted some of it to give the impression that Jindal was a bigot. I know it’s Louisiana and all, but that’s cold.


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Political reporters ignore Catholics

While reading the voting breakdown of the New Hampshire primary, I noticed two trends among Catholics. One trend was that Hillary Clinton won a large plurality (44 percent) of those Catholics who voted in the Democratic primary. The other trend was that Mike Huckabee underperformed among those Catholics who voted in the Republican primary; he got 7 percent of the Catholic vote, compared to 11 percent overall.


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What is it about Mormonism?

Last week’s Sunday New York Times Magazine had an article analyzing the Mormon religion and arguing for voters choosing a president without regard to his or her religion. “What is it about Mormonism” was written by Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor and adjunct senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations.


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Red state, blue state -- pshaw

After reading stories about the New Hampshire election results last night, I remembered that 12 years ago Mark Penn and Dick Morris, two all-powerful pollsters for President Clinton, had discovered a remarkably effective polling technique.


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