Editor's note: The following is reprinted, with permission, from the June 6, 2005, issue of The Weekly Standard, a political magazine.

You remember, or perhaps you don't, Sen. Orrin Hatch's 2000 presidential campaign. The senator talks about it in soft inflections, recalling this event and that debate. But especially he talks about what motivated him to run. Hatch, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, cites polling data from 1999 suggesting that 17 percent of Americans wouldn't vote for a Mormon for president under any circumstances. "One reason I ran was to knock down the prejudicial wall that exists" against Mormons, he says. "I wanted to make it easier for the next candidate of my faith."

That next candidate just might be Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts.

It may seem too early to be talking about 2008. But George W. Bush can't run again, and, in a break from the usual pattern, the vice president, Richard Cheney, probably won't be a candidate. So the field looks wide open. And Romney is among those being mentioned in the press and GOP circles for 2008. He'd be a legitimate candidate, regardless of who else might run.

But would his religion hurt him? Would he run into a prejudicial wall? Maybe, though there are reasons to think otherwise. The country could be looking at its first Mormon president — or, as Romney would prefer to put it, a president who happens to be a Mormon.

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Willard Mitt Romney is a native of Michigan, the son of the late George Romney, CEO of American Motors, a three-term governor of Michigan in the 1960s, Nixon's secretary of Housing and Urban Development and, briefly in 1968, a presidential candidate. Mitt Romney went to Brigham Young University (he was valedictorian in the College of the Humanities) before collecting business and law degrees from Harvard.

Staying in Boston, he worked for a consulting firm for three years, then founded a venture capital company. Romney acquired a reputation for fixing troubled companies, so it wasn't surprising that in 1990 his own company, which he'd left and which was sinking into debt, asked him to come back and save it.

But Romney's most remarkable intervention — the one that placed him on a national stage — came with the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. In 1999 the event already was $379 million in debt, and there were allegations of bribery involving top officials. Romney was asked to head up the Games. Under his leadership, they turned into a spectacular success, clearing a profit of $100 million. Romney himself contributed $1 million and donated his three years of pay ($275,000 per annum) to charity.