BY PAUL KAIHLA — The Democrats have their “minority” candidate in-waiting for president — Hillary — and a minority president, through the prism of the ‘race card.’

Religously-speaking, the Republicans have a minority candidate, too. Mitt Romney (translation: Mormon).

Mitt is a Boomer begat by a baronette of American politics: George Romney, three-term governor of Michigan, a former federal cabinet secretary and a runner-up to Nixon in the 1968 Republican primary for president. But did you know that Romney senior was born in Chihauhau, Mexico?

And did you know why? His parents had fled the U.S. because the LDS — Mormon shorthand for their official church — had disavowed polygamy. Although it was officially illegal in Mexico, who back-then-there would give an Eff about such a statute in an out-of-the-way place?

Was Mitt’s father a polygamist? Hardly. But he was a true believer, and actually worked as a Mormon missionary before his political career and turn as CEO of American Motors.

Back to the future: When Mitt launched his campaign for the 2008 presidential nomination, he worked overtime to dispell “misconceptions” about Mormonism in a big interview that the New York Times splashed on its front page:

He said he shared with many Americans the bafflement over obsolete Mormon practices like polygamy — he described it as “bizarre” — and disputed the argument that his faith would require him to be loyal to his church before his country.

Holy speaking in tongues — ”bafflement”?! Your own grandparents fled the U.S. over the issue, and your talking point that polygamy is so obsolete and outres doesn’t wash when there’s an estimated 30,000 practicing polygs in Utah alone today.

HBO riffed on the phenomenon in its hit series, Big Love, and reality TV filled out the genre with Sister Wives.

We write this from a place of actually knowing, and having spent time with, polygs in Utah: Woe be unto Mitt Romney.

In a famous poll by CBS, only one religion ranked lower than Mormonism in the minds of Americans: Islam.

It’s partly why Romney was heckled in Florida in 2008 by a lost mind: “You sir, you are a pretender. You do not know the Lord.”

No American-born faith has as much baggage as Mormonism, with the exception of a branch of the Seventh Day Adventists called the Branch Davidians.

Mitt’s idea is to run as the intact family-values candidate of the righteous, a brand distinction not available to McCain and Giuliani in ’08, or within reach of Newt now.

It works in a geo-historical sense, too. There’s a certain symmetry to his Massachusetts-Utah axis: the Mormons were the Puritans of the Wild West. But it won’t have legs in an America where campaigns are conducted over airwaves, and the first rule of politics is, ‘the best defence is a good offence’.

Romney’s foes may not have fathomed how deeply they can mine Mitt’s Mormonism for campaign hit-pieces, starting with the mining habits of Mormonism’s founder.

Here’s an excerpt from the book, Savage Messiah, about the man whom Mormon’s embrace as their Buddha, Joseph Smith:

The most important sect spawned by the Second Great Awakening was the brainchild of Joseph Smith. He was the son of a farmer who had settled in New York state, and claimed the ability to locate underground streams with a forked hazel switch. Young Joseph, an ambitious sort, decided that he could do one better than his father. While still in his teens, he began to advertise his services as a finder of buried money, crystals and enchanted stones that could be used to locate underground caverns. Directing his team of money-diggers with a wand at midnight under a full moon, Smith demanded absolute silence from his clients and the assembled spectators. When, as was usually the case, his crew turned up nothing, Smith would explain that just as they were about to reach the treasure, someone under the devil’s influence had spoken and caused the bounty to disappear. In 1830, at the age of 24, Smith published the Book of Mormon, which he claimed was a translation of a set of gold plates he’d dug up in the hills near Palmyra, NY, in a spot reavealed to him by the angel of God.

Smith claimed that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, the cradle of human civlization and home of an emissary of God named Mormon who preached around the time of Christ. The Son of God himself had visted the American continent after his crucifixion, and would appear there again for the Second Coming. Smith soon gathered a large number of followers in an organization he named the Chruch of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and led them from New York to Missouri to establish the new Jerusalem. But during their long quest for sanctuary the young Mormon sect was ejected from town after town as suspicious outsiders. In 1843, Smith enshrined plural marrriage as a sacred commandment of Mormonism. He pointed out that the Bible called upon Christians to “multiply and replenish the Earth,” and that the old prophets had had many wives. A year later, Smith was shot and killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois.

 

Psychologist Abraham Maslow on survival: The Hierarchy of Needs

Born Liars: “How to spot a liar?” (Toronto Globe and Mail)

Online dis-inhibition: Group-think and de-individuation

Not surviving, or winning: Movie star Matt Damon pulls out of June 20 fundraiser for Congressman Weiner (New York Daily News)

Socially (unconscious) media: “When does online fantasy become infidelity?” (Salon.com)

Euro Group prez says it’s his job to lie: “I’m not going to go to confession because of a false denial. God understands more about the financial markets than many who write about them.” – Dr. Jean-Claude Juncker in Der Spiegel

Clinton saved his presidency by lying about Lewinsky: “Dissembling may well have saved his career . . . the shock would have (otherwise) forced him out of office in a matter of days.” (Jeff Greenfield in Politico)

Russia’s Jesus: Mikhail Gorbachev recommends “shock therapy”

Hollow men: Jay Leno’s Lenten pilgrimmage on Mulholland Drive in a luxury sports car

Howard Stern takes on Oprah and Gabourey Sidibe: “Oprah is another liar, a filthy liar . . .”

Psychic charged with investor fraud: “He should have seen this coming”

Chelsea Clinton marriage: converting to Judaism?

The government runs America? Senator Al Franken begs for infrastructure, courtesy of Google

SOUL’S CODE — When Freud coined the term, transference, he used it to describe the unconscious projection we have about a parent, or some other childhood figure, onto a lover, boss — or, yes, in the media age — a presidential candidate.

Is Barack Obama the Son of Promise, Child of Hope, collective father figure, and redeemer in the eyes of the world of us — as in, the “U.S.”?

We rejoice in his victory by documenting the Top 10 similarities and synchronicities between the president-elect and Jesus the savior:

10. Jesus urged his fellow Jews to pay their taxes (“Render unto Ceasar, the things which are Ceasar’s”). Obama plans to make Jews who are wealthy pay higher taxes.

9. Jesus was a vegan who didn’t do drugs or smoke. While campaigning for president, Obama quit smoking — and continued to eat arugala, at least off-camera.

8. In 1987, William Mosley wrote a famous book arguing that Jesus was black. Way before then, Obama was black. (Highschool basketball team photo, Punahou School, Hawaii, 1977).

7. Jesus Christ and Barack Obama both share the same middle initial: “H.”

6. The Romans thought Jesus was a rebel and a radical. The Republicans think that Obama is a radical, Al-Qaeda double-agent and secret member of the Wobblies.

5. Obama dressed up in funny-looking, Middle Eastern-type robes. According to church paintings and Sunday school coloring books, that’s all Jesus ever wore.

4. Jesus lived and died seven centuries before the creation of Islam. Obama is not now, nor has he ever been, a Muslim.

3. Saint John the Baptist said a messiah was coming, and baptized Jesus as the one. In a summer 2008 TV ad the McCain campaign declared, “Barack Obama may be The One“.

2. Both Jesus and Obama got their values from their mothers, who at various Kodak Moments were single-moms. As for deadbeat-daddy issues, let’s not even go there.

And the Number 1 reason that Barack Obama and Jesus are, for all intents and purposes, practically the same person:

They both hung out with some dodgy peeps, pharisees, prostitutes and revolutionaries — and that’s just Obama . . .

BY PAUL KAIHLA —  John McCain argued that Barack Obama’s reading of blue-collar voters in Pennsylvannia is “elitist,” and represents a “fundamental contradiction of what I believe America’s all about.”

At the umpteenth Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said Obama is “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.”

In the argot of public relations firms, those were killer ‘key messages’ to put Obama in a reactive mode for his candor at a San Francisco fundraiser on April 6 (listen to the recording). But if you pull the camera back for a moment, Obama’s take on Reagan Democrats who go right-wing on social issues exquisitely mirrors the received wisdom among leading figures in transpersonal psychology and the spiritual self-help movement.

As Obama was tipping off a campaign volunteer about the mood on the street before she parachuted into Pennsylvannia ahead of the state’s April 22 primary, here is his “bitter” quote:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.

The economist Richard Florida has brilliantly broken down the U.S. labor market into three broad tiers: blue-collar, service-sector and so-called “creative class” workers. The latter are the engineers, scientists, media types, artists, teachers and healers who occupy roughly the top third of America’s 140-million-strong workforce.

Some of you will see this as a stretch but you can make an analogy between the have and have-nots in the labor market, and the hierarchy represented by the human chakra system.

Indian and Chinese models of spirituality and medicine have long held that we are essentially electro-magnetic beings, and Hindu tradition in particular correlates our biology and biography to energy centers in the spine located at major branchings of the human nervous system, beginning at the base of the spinal column and moving upward to the top of the skull.

A notion among many depth-psychology therapists and followers of mysticism is that frustrated, downwardly-mobile workers (along with megalo-millionaire Larry Ellison types) are stuck in their 1st and 2nd chakras — the ‘energy anatomy’ rooted in survival and sexuality — and attendant emotions of fear, anger, jealousy, and material fixation.

Lord knows, we all channel that shadow stuff. But the second leg of the argument goes that creative class types — whether they’re software writers at Apple in Cupertino, CA or a music professor at a university in Boston — have had more success (and interest) in opening up their higher chakras, especially the ones associated with intellectual awareness, imagination and inspiration.

Caroline Myss, the author of a cross-over hit called Sacred Contracts, is fun to hear on this tipping point in personal growth. Her starting point: people who seek a safety net in tribal structures like family, a company, or a community are unconsciously leaching their personal power — or in this site’s language, planting bugs in their individual soul’s code. The reason: those traditional tribes can no longer uphold their end of the contract . . .

If I asked you, ‘What tribal rules are you plugged into?’ Could you answer me? Have you ever even thought about it? Your first chakra requires that you plug yourself into a tribal structure that nurtures you, that you feel safe in. We are essentially communcal creatures . . .

Your first chakra is your expression of whether you expect society to be there to take care of you. Your personality can say, ‘No, I don’t’. But if I sat down with you and said, ‘Oh ya? What do you expect from your boss? What do you expect from a place that you work for?’ . . .

Whether its General Motors, Dupont or little companies, the universal phenomenon that’s going on is that no tribal system is able to take care of its own. The tribal archetype is changing.

Isn’t that the vibe that Obama is picking up in the rust-belt? The more that ‘have-not’ tribes are challenged by a labor market that’s no longer local but global, the more people who operate out of a lower-chakra consciousness are programmed to go to a rearguard group-hug around in-your-face tropes like guns and bible-thumping.

We all know an Ex who acts out an F-You attitude because he or she thinks they’ve been robbed, and the world owes them a favor. A victim identity is low-chakra, the visionary identity resides in the 5th and 6th Myss again:

The thought, ‘We create our own reality’ stands in direct opposition to the perception of the victim. What being a victim gives you permission to do is engage in self-pity, and blame others for your circumstances.

As the economist Florida says, Obama is the candidate of America’s “Have” workers because he’s a conduit for the aspirations of the creative class. Just because he dared to point out a psycho-dynamic among “have-nots” isn’t a proof that he’s more patronizing than sympathizing. Rather than being “out of touch,” as both Obama’s Democratic and Republican accusers claim, he seems to be multi-dimensionally in touch.