What Joseph Smith's Candidacy Can Teach Mitt Romney

It isn’t widely known that in 1844 Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ran against James K. Polk and Henry Clay for president of the U.S. Perhaps this detail has been lost amid the many story lines of Smith’s head-spinningly eventful life. In that year alone, Smith was mayor of a rapidly growing city, a church president, lieutenant general of a large militia, shopkeeper, surveyor, fugitive in two states, landlord, hotel manager, and prophet of the Lord. Not only did he have a whole bunch of wives to attend to, he also had the nearly full-time job of dancing around the fact that he had a whole bunch of wives. And still he found time, in April of that year, to have his Council of Fifty elect him “King and Ruler Over Israel.”

As his tasks piled up and his stately Temple took shape in the center of Nauvoo, Ill., Smith’s enemies, both near and far, multiplied and grew militant. With only months left before Election Day, his presidential campaign was brought to a shocking end when a mob of armed men, possibly with state backing, murdered him in prison, where he was being held for treason after he declared martial law in Nauvoo.