The TicketGingrich aide steps down after calling Mormonism a ‘cult’
Less than a week after he was hired, Newt Gingrich's political director in Iowa was forced out of the campaign Tuesday after it was reported he called Mormonism a "cult" in a political focus group last week.
Craig Bergman, a longtime political activist in the state who joined the Gingrich campaign late last week, said in a focus group conducted by the Iowa Republican Party and McClatchy Newspapers that Mitt Romney's religion would cost the candidate votes among evangelical voters.
"A lot of the evangelicals believe God would give us four more years of Obama just for the opportunity to expose the cult of Mormon," Bergman said. "There's a thousand pastors ready to do that."
The focus group was conducted last Wednesday—apparently before Bergman, who backed Ron Paul in 2008, went to work for Gingrich.
On Tuesday night, Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond said in a statement to reporters that Bergman had "agreed to step away from his role" in the Gingrich campaign.
"He made a comment to a focus group prior to becoming an employee that is inconsistent with Newt 2012's pledge to run a positive and solutions orientated campaign," Hammond said.
The move comes just a day after Gingrich sent a letter to staff and supporters urging them not to go negative against his opponents in the Republican presidential primary.
But the drama hints at continued underlying concerns among evangelical voters about Romney's religion—worries the candidate tried to combat four years ago during his first bid for the GOP nomination.
In October, the issue surfaced in a major way, when Texas pastor Robert Jeffress, who is backing Rick Perry for the nomination, suggested Romney "is part of a cult." The former Massachusetts governor slammed the pastor's comments and called on Perry to apologize and repudiate his supporter's remarks.
Romney previously signaled he was not interested in speaking out more aggressively about his religion. During a visit to Iowa in October, he told a voter he would not give a speech to clear up "misinformation" about Mormonism, insisting there shouldn't be a "religious test" for candidates seeking the presidency.
But Romney has tweaked that strategy in recent days. At last Saturday's Republican primary debate sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo!, the candidate spoke about his time as a Mormon missionary overseas—a subject he has rarely addressed publicly during his years of campaigning for the presidency—and how it helped him to empathize with people who were less fortunate than him.
"I was able to serve my church overseas, and to meet people there that had very difficult circumstances in their life," Romney said. "I also spent time in this country, serving as a pastor in my church, and again, having the occasion to work with people that were really struggling."
And as the New York Times' Ashley Parker reports today, Romney brought up the subject again on the campaign trail this week—as part of a larger effort to humanize his candidacy. But it's unclear if Romney will be successful in changing the minds of voters who are already skeptical of his religion and his candidacy.
A recent Pew Research Poll found that less than half of likely GOP primary voters could correctly identify Romney's religion, but among those who could, Romney's unfavorable rating was 36 percent. By comparison, among voters who believe Mormonism is a Christian faith, his unfavorable rating was just 25 percent. His biggest stumbling block is with evangelical voters, 15 percent of whom said they couldn't support his bid for the presidency because of his religion.
That's potentially bad news for Romney in Iowa and in South Carolina, two early voting states where values voters have great sway in the GOP contest. But Romney aides, while acknowledging their boss's problem with evangelicals, have long hoped his religion would take a back seat to other issues, like the economy.
"For some people, it's a real problem," a top Romney booster in South Carolina, who declined to be named discussing campaign strategy, bluntly acknowledged in an interview with Yahoo News. "But people are struggling, and our hope is that most voters will see Mitt Romney as the man who can get the country back on track and send Barack Obama back to Chicago. That's really the most important issue in this campaign, not a litmus test over religion."
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