Mitt Romney, the candidate who himself is forced to deal with popular prejudice toward his religion, is now trying to deny that he categorically ruled out the possibility of including a Muslim in his cabinet. Speaking in Florida yesterday, he put a different spin on the initial controversy:
“[Mansoor Ijaz's] question was did I need to have a Muslim in my Cabinet to be able to confront radical jihad and would it be important to have a Muslim in my Cabinet,” said Romney, “and I said, ‘No I don’t think you need to have a Muslim in the Cabinet to take on radical jihad any more than during the second world war we needed to have a Japanese American to help us understand the threat that was coming from Japan.
“The people who would be part of my cabinet is something that I really haven’t given a lot of thought to at this point, but I don’t have boxes I check off as to their ethnicity…instead I would choose people based upon their merits and their capabilities,” he added.
It’s true that Ijaz’s question did seem to be premised on the notion that having a Muslim in the Cabinet would be useful for countering jihadism, but it’s pretty clear that a critical part of Romney’s answer was based on a different premise. Romney said (emphasis mine):
“…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.”
That’s not saying “it isn’t necessary to hire Muslims to help counter jihadism.” That’s saying that American Muslims simply aren’t important enough to merit representation in his government. Romney’s later claim that he doesn’t have “boxes I check off as to their ethnicity” is strange, because the existence of such demographic boxes is exactly what he implied when he made the statement to Ijaz.
Of course, Romney may simply be using semantics to try to weasel around some of the implications of his (and his party’s) general appeal to anti-Muslim bigotry. As far as the GOP primary is concerned, this controversy probably just helps him.
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