Five Year-old WHO Video Goes Viral

WHO Morning host Jan Mickelson  who grilled Mitt Romney about his Mormon faith in a 2007 interview is expressing dismay that a clip of that conversation has gone viral as Election Day arrives and says whoever put it out was trying to make the GOP nominee “look weird.”

“I’d say, No. One, it wasn’t a gotcha interview,” Mickelson, the host of the radio talk show based in Des Moines, Iowa, told Kathy Glueck atPolitico. “It wasn’t designed as an ambush for Romney.

The clip in question, which resurfaced last week and has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube, “left out the context,” Mickelson said.

The video making the rounds shows Mickelson and Romney sparring over the GOP presidential nominee’s Mormon faith in the lead-up to the 2008 primary contests. That piece of the interview, which was conducted after the two were already off the air, continued the on-air interview’s broader conversation about how Romney’s position on the abortion question had evolved since his time as governor of Massachusetts, he said.

“It wasn’t about his theology,” Mickelson said. “It was about the transition of his ethics, and why did he change his view, under what circumstances. I thought I was asking totally coherent questions that I thought were softballs.”

But the viral video focuses heavily on questions surrounding Romney’s religion, as the two delved into religious texts and discussed the Mormon Church’s positions on subjects including the second coming of Christ and abortion.

“I’m not running to talk about Mormonism,” Romney snapped toward the end of the clip.

Mickelson speculated that whoever is behind the YouTube clip — the user’s identity is unclear — likely wanted to highlight elements of Romney’s Mormon faith because “it makes him look weird.”

Read More Now.