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Trust Mitt Romney to be on top of the latest trend of the superrich: the trophy basement.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the new fashion to look low-key on the outside while digging deep for opulence—carving out subterranean spaces for Turkish baths, Italianate spas, movie theaters, skateboarding ramps, squash courts, discos and golf-simulation centers.
The Journal reported that Romney has filed an application to replace his single-story 3,000-square-foot beach house in La Jolla, Calif., with a 7,400-square-foot home featuring an additional 3,600 square feet of finished underground space.
It’s a metaphor alert, reinforcing the two image problems Romney has: that he’s an out-of-touch plutocrat and that his true nature is buried where we can’t see it.
There’s a certain pathos to Romney. His manner is so inauthentic, you can’t find him anywhere. He has the same problem that diminished the equally animatronic Al Gore. Gore kept mum on the one thing that made him come alive, the environment, fearing he’d be cast, as W. liked to say, as “a green, green lima bean.”
Romney also feels he must hide an essential part of who he is: a pillar of the Mormon Church. He fears he would turn off voters by talking too much about a faith that many evangelicals dismiss as a cult and not a true Christian religion.
When he talked about his beliefs in his last presidential run, it sometimes provoked confusion, like this explanation to an Iowa radio host about the second coming of Christ: that Jesus would first appear in Jerusalem and then, “over the thousand years that follow, the millennium, he will reign from two places, the law will come from Missouri, and the other will be from Jerusalem.”
Just as Romney did not step up immediately after Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke “a slut,” he has yet to step up as the cases have mounted of Jews posthumously and coercively baptized by Mormons, including hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims; the parents of the death camp survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal; and Daniel Pearl, the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by al-Qaida in Pakistan.
Believing that only Mormons can get into the highest level of heaven, the Celestial Kingdom, and that others will be limited to the Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms, they have baptized anyone and everyone, including Anne Frank, Gandhi, Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Elvis.
Asked by Newsweek in 2007 if he had done baptisms for the dead, which involve white garb and immersion in water, a startled Romney replied, “I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.”
Mormon feminists got upset this winter when they found that young women in some temples had not been allowed to do proxy baptisms while they were menstruating.
Church leaders have lately stepped up efforts to stop such baptisms, reminding church members that their “pre-eminent obligation” is not to celebrities and Holocaust victims but to their own ancestors.
Matthew Bowman, who wrote “The Mormon People,” says Mormons “have a hard time understanding why people from other religions find this so offensive. Mormons don’t think of these people as being made Mormon unless their spirit accepts the Gospel. They just think they’ve given them an opportunity. Mormonism is wildly optimistic.”
Mormons had designated Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, as “ready” for a posthumous proxy burial, even though he is very much alive at 83 and still teaching at Boston University and in Florida.
Wiesel calls “the whole process very strange,” and faults Romney, a Mormon stake president: “After all, Romney is not simply a Mormon. He’s been a bishop of the Mormon Church. He could have called and told me he wanted me to know that he spoke to the elders and told them to stop it. Silence doesn’t help truth.”
He added: ”They have baptized over 600,000 Holocaust victims. There is nothing positive in what they are doing. It’s an insult. You cannot ask the dead their opinion.”•
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Dowd is a New York Times columnist. Send comments on this column to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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