Who is behind the anti-Mormon push polling in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Residents in New Hampshire and Iowa have received phone calls raising questions about Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, his Mormon faith and the Vietnam War-era military deferments he received while serving as a missionary in France.

Western Wats, a Utah-based company, placed the calls that initially sound like a poll but then pose questions that cast Romney in a harsh light, according to those who received the calls. In politics, this type of phone surveying is called "push polling" — contacting potential voters and asking questions intended to plant a message in voters' minds, usually negative, rather than gauging peoples' attitudes.

A spokesman for the company would not comment on whether it made the calls. "Western Wats has never, currently does not, nor will it ever engage in push polling," its client services director, Robert Maccabee, said in a statement released Thursday night.

The 20-minute calls started on Sunday in New Hampshire and Iowa. At least seven people in the two early voting states received the calls.

I'm sorry, Mr. Maccabee, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it is most certainly a freakin' duck.

What was in the calls?

Among the questions was whether a resident knew that Romney was a Mormon, that he received military deferments when he served as a Mormon missionary in France, that his five sons did not serve in the military, that Romney's faith did not accept blacks as bishops into the 1970s and that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible.

"It started out like all the other calls. ... Then all of the sudden it got very unsettling and very negative," said Anne Baker, an independent voter from Hollis, N.H.

"Whatever campaign is engaging in this type of awful religious bigotry as a line of political attack, it is repulsive and, to put it bluntly, un-American," Romney spokesman Matt Rhoades said. "There is no excuse for these attacks. Governor Romney is campaigning as an optimist who wants to lead the nation. These attacks are just the opposite. It's ugly and divisive."

Sabrina Matteson, a Republican from Epsom, N.H., said she got a call on Wednesday.

"The first 15 or 20 questions were general questions about the leading candidates," she said. "Then he started asking me very, very negatively phrased questions about Romney. The first one was would you have a more favorable, less favorable, blah, blah, blah, impression of Mitt Romney if you knew that his five sons had never served in the military and that he considered working on a presidential campaign as public service or some such question."

The questions sound biased towards McCain, and but there are connections between Western Wats and folks involved in both the McCain and Giuliani campaigns. Current speculation is that this call may be coming from a 527 organization. If so, what is the organization and who is it serving as a surrogate for?

I'll say it flat out -- any candidate whose campaign sponsored this call would be unfit to receive the nomination. Any 527 that engaged in this sort of behavior ought to be rejected by decent Americans, and those involved with the group's operation should be blackballed by every campaign. And the failure of any candidate to denounce this sort of tactic of attacking Romney's religion must be denounced by every candidate, Republican and Democrat, as such bigotry has no place in American politics.

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Posted by: Greg at 11:27 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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