President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Gov. Chris Christie have seen strikingly different reactions to their views on the Ground Zero Mosque: Obama was criticized for incoherence, Reid blasted for opportunism, and Christie praised as a grownup conservative.

That’s weird. Because, let’s be honest, the three views amount to marginally different semantic glosses on the same basic argument: these people have a legal right to build this mosque. And they probably shouldn’t do it.

Here’s Obama:

“I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.

“But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan,’’ he said.

And:

“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” he said in response to a reporter’s question after he spoke about efforts to aid the Gulf Coast region. “I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.”

Obama emphasizes the tolerance angle, but the bit about the “wisdom” of putting the mosque so close to Ground Zero implies a broader dubiousness. By contrast, Reid shifts emphasis to that dubiousness, and is slightly more direct. Here’s his spokesman:

“The First Amendment protects freedom of religion,” Manley wrote in an e-mail. “Senator Reid respects that, but thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.”

Christie is most opaque of all. He engages in the same sort of ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ argument as both Reid and Obama, and like Obama refuses to directly comment on the wisdom of the mosque’s planned location. But he manages to come out ahead by condemning the politicization of the issue by both Republicans and Democrats — a neat trick:

“Given my last position, that I was the first U.S attorney post 9/11 in New Jersey. I understand acutely the pain and sorrow and upset of the family members who lost loved ones that day. At the hands of radical Muslim extremist. And their sensitivities and concerns have to be taken into account. Just because it’s nearly nine years later, those sensitivities cannot and should not be ignored. On the other hand, we cannot paint all of Islam with that brush…We have to bring people together. And what offends me the most about all this, is that it’s being used as a political football by both parties. And what disturbs me about the president remarks is that he is now using it as a political football as well. I think the president of the United State should rise above that. And should not be using this as a political football, and I don’t believe that it would be responsible of me to get involved and comment on this any further because it just put me in the same political arena as all of them.

“My principles on this are two-fold. One, that we have to acknowledge, respect and give some measure of deference to the feelings of the family members who lost there loved ones there that day. But it would be wrong to so overreact to that, that we paint Islam with a brush of radical Muslim extremists that just want to kill Americans because we are Americans. But beyond that…I am not going to get into it, because I would be guilty of candidly what I think some Republicans are guilty of, and the president is now the president is guilty of, of playing politics with this issue, and I simply am not going to do it.”

Asked if he’d call upon both parties to stop, he said, “Well, that again will be playing politics with the issue. I said what I feel about it, and I don’t believe it is up to me to pontificate on other people about what they should do. I just observe what I observe. And I don’t believe that this issue should be a political football. I just don’t. And I think that both sides of this issue now are using this as a political football. And I don’t think it brings people together in America, I think it just further drives people apart, and creates divisions, and I think that’s bad for our country. And all people in our country suffer when those kind of things happen.”

So why the different reactions to statements that are variations on a theme? Because we bring the dominant narratives about each man with us when we interpret their muddled, Rorschach messages on the mosque. The median voter suspects that Reid is a weasel who’d say anything to get reelected; that Obama serves two masters in his progressive and pragmatic impulses; and that Christie is a straight-shooter. So he reads Reid’s statement as weaselly, Obama’s as equivocal, and Christie’s as forthright.

Context matters.