Last night we learned that, in her forthcoming book, Sarah Palin criticizes the late President John F. Kennedy on the historic speech he gave relating to his Catholicism during the 1960 presidential campaign. In the book, she "writes":
"essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are."
She then turns around and "praises" Mitt Romney for embracing is own faith.
She praises Mitt Romney, a Mormon, for not "doing a JFK" during his campaign for the 2008 GOP nomination. "Where Kennedy seemed to want to run away from religion, Mitt Romney forthrightly embraced it," she writes.
It is not praise we should take at face value. We know the kind of campaign she likes to wage and the people she thinks of as her constituents. We also know that, when she ran for Mayor of Wasilla, she was accused of running a stealth campaign questioning her opponent's Christianity. By saying that a candidate's faith matters, and giving Mitt Romney credit form not hiding the fact that he is a Mormon, she could be setting up either a similar stealth campaign, or full frontal assault (which is plausible since nothing is too outrageous these days). In other words, we could see something like a religious civil war within the Republican Party between the Mormon West and the Fundamentalist South.