With his campaign in trouble, Mitt Romney has finally decided to give a so-called "Mormon speech" to explain his religion to an allegedly skeptical GOP electorate. It's troubling that a candidate even has to defend his religion in modern-day America. But putting that aside, the speech is unlikely to turn Romney's campaign around.

First, as Jay Cost has noted, the politics behind the move are too obvious. "I suddenly fall behind in Iowa therefore I give "the Mormon speech." It hardly makes Romney look like a man of conviction.

Second Romney will inevitably be compared to JFK, who gave a similar speech to a group of Houston ministers in September of 1960 to defend his Catholic faith. Any time a candidate is going to be compared to Kennedy or Ronald Reagan for that matter he's probably headed down the wrong path. It's a tough standard to meet.

Most important, Kennedy did some things Romney isn't doing. He gave the speech during the fall campaign (September), when far more voters were paying attention and 19 Texas TV stations actually carried the address live. He gave it before a hostile audience of Protestant ministers, which sent out a wonderful image around the country of a young "profile in courage" candidate, confronting a group of elderly skeptics. In contrast, Romney is speaking to what looks like a group of sympathizers at the Bush Library. It's not the same picture.

Most important, people forget what the JFK speech really accomplished. The Kennedy forces converted portions of the speech into one, 15, and 30-minute ads. But they ran them mostly in heavily Catholic areas, not in the south where the bigotry against Kennedy was the strongest. In other words, JFK used that speech primarily not to combat the bigots, but to rally his religious base and it paid off in November when Kennedy won over 75% of the Catholic vote ­ -- a record Democratic party proportion that secured him the presidency. (Kennedy actually ran behind Adlai Stevenson's 1956 totals in the Protestant south in states such as Alabama and Georgia, but not by enough to lose him these states in a solidly Democratic region.)

Simply put, there aren't nearly enough Mormons for Romney to mobilize them into an electoral base. Maybe Romney will still win the nomination. But it won't be because of this speech.

To read Steven Stark's complete "Presidential Tote Board" blog, go to www.thephoenix.com/toteboard/