A few days ago Dubya had the effontery to quote Dorothy Day. Just like hm stealing the slogan of the CDF on Marian Wright Edelman. (Her husband, Peter Edelman, who quit his asst. Sec. post at HHS during Bubba's first term [after the Welfare Deform bill was signed, see his articles in The Atlantic and The American Prospect] has a newish book, no?)
TNR had this recently, http://www.thenewrepublic.com/ http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=Catholics&sp-a=000514b3-sp00000000 http://www.tnr.com/042301/lizza042301.html WHITE HOUSE WATCH Salvation by Ryan Lizza
Post date 04.13.01 | Issue date 04.23.01
In late March, President Bush traveled to an obscure corner of Washington, D.C., to give one of the most striking and underreported speeches of his presidency. It wasn't about education reform or tax cuts. In fact, it had little to do with Bush or his administration at all. It was rather a simple, eloquent, Christ-drenched tribute to Pope John Paul II, offered to commemorate the opening of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center at Catholic University. "The pope reminds us," Bush told the gathered clergy, politicians, and civic leaders, "that while freedom defines our nation, responsibility must define our lives. He challenges us to live up to our aspirations, to be a fair and just society where all are welcomed, all are valued, and all are protected. And he is never more eloquent than when he speaks for a culture of life. The culture of life is a welcoming culture, never excluding, never dividing, never despairing, and always affirming the goodness of life in all its seasons. In the culture of life we must make room for the stranger. We must comfort the sick. We must care for the aged. We must welcome the immigrant. We must teach our children to be gentle with one another. We must defend in love the innocent child waiting to be born." Pro-choice Democrats in attendance, like Ted Kennedy, shifted uncomfortably in their seats. But the rest of the audience rose in a standing ovation.
It was a remarkable moment, but not an isolated one. Bush has courted the Catholic vote more doggedly than any modern president, explicitly-and often eloquently-placing "compassionate conservatism" within the context of the Catholic tradition of aiding the underprivileged and protecting the sanctity of life. The president makes a point of meeting with local bishops wherever he travels, but especially on visits to swing states. He has made Catholic leaders fixtures at White House events, and his political staff holds a weekly conference call with conservative Catholics. The reason for all this attention? Bush advisers have concluded that what they call the "religiously active Catholic" vote was the key to W.'s narrow victory in November. And they believe it could bring him a landslide in 2004.
On Election Day 2000, exit polls showed that 65 percent of voters thought the country was on the "right track." According to political science models, this economic contentment should have presaged a decisive victory by Al Gore. But alas for Gore-and for political science-last year's election was not a function of the economy, stupid. In those same exit polls, 57 percent of voters described the "moral climate of the country" as "seriously off on the wrong track." Of those voters, Bush won two-thirds; Gore, meanwhile, won 70 percent of the smaller group that was content with the country's moral course. This schism over values is one indication of the most striking demographic division of last year's electorate. More than by age, income, race, or gender, the electorate was split in half by religion-or, more precisely, by religiosity. About two-thirds of voters who say they never attend religious services chose Gore, while a nearly identical percentage of voters who frequently attend services picked Bush. As John Kenneth White, a professor at Catholic University who is writing a book on the values divide, puts it, "The more you attend church, the more likely you are to vote Republican."
his split has been a long time in the making. The migration of religious Americans into the Republican Party began 30 years ago, led by white evangelical Protestants, who now make up 40 percent of the GOP presidential vote. What was new last year was the success Bush had in attracting a long-cherished Republican target: religiously active Catholics. Michael Barone, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, calls this success "one of the untold stories of the campaign." Working through a "Catholic Task Force" at the Republican National Convention, the Bush campaign compiled a list of almost three million active Catholics in 14 states. Over the course of the campaign, each household on the list received at least two phone calls and two pieces of mail, highlighting such issues as violence, sex on television, gay leaders in the Boy Scouts, same-sex marriage, and abortion. In addition, Bush subtly wove Catholic themes into his speeches (see "Spin Doctrine," by Franklin Foer, TNR, June 5, 2000) and met with Catholic leaders during stops across the country. There was even a special skybox at the Republican convention in Philadelphia to showcase prominent Catho- lics. Other Bush aides worked assiduously to place pro-Bush articles in the newspapers of the nearly 200 U.S. dioceses.
Fortunately for the Bush campaign, its efforts coincided with an increased willingness by Catholic leaders to involve themselves in national politics-a trend that mirrors evangelicals' earlier move to the GOP. In previous elections, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops had distributed a lengthy and little-publicized document outlining the Church's position on a variety of political topics-abortion, aid for the poor, and so on. Last year, the group produced a shorter, simpler version more explicitly intended to serve as a voter guide; copies were sent to every Catholic parish in the country, with accompanying materials encouraging local church leaders to host candidate forums and register voters. A press release urged, "Bishops to Catholics: Get politically involved in 2000 election." A group called Priests for Life went further still, running TV and newspaper ads calling on Catholics to support anti-abortion candidates.
All of this paid off. Deal Hudson, one of Bush's principal Catholic advisers and the editor and publisher of the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis, says, "Karl Rove has said several times that of all the basic target groups, Catholics were the most responsive." Despite narrowly losing the popular vote, Bush won religious Catholics by the same margin Ronald Reagan did in his 1984 landslide. More importantly, the combination of religiously active protestants and Cath- olics made up 54 percent of Bush's total vote. But, while 84 percent of religiously active white evangelicals voted for Bush, only 57 percent of active Catholics supported him. If the GOP continues its gradual absorption of voters of faith, that remaining 43 percent of active Catholics, more than four million voters, will be the most available segment of the entire electorate for Bush. According to Hudson and Steve Wagner, a Bush adviser who has been studying Catholic voters for several years, cranking up that segment of the Catholic vote-conveniently clustered in several swing states Bush lost-to white evangelical levels is the key to forging an enduring GOP majority coalition.
During Bush's first few months as president, he has continued to court Catholics as aggressively as he did in the wake of his disastrous visit to the anti-Catholic Bob Jones University a year ago. The day after the inauguration, Rove called Hudson and asked him to arrange a meeting between Bush and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the newly installed leader of Washington's Catholic community. A few days later, Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, White House counsel Al Gonzales, and an assemblage of bishops and cardinals dined at McCarrick's official residence. A week later, on January 31, Bush hosted several dozen Catholic intellectuals at the White House to discuss Catholic charities. And, the week after that, he held a one-on-one meeting at the White House with Boston's Bernard Cardinal Law. Just as he did during the campaign, Bush tries to make time during stops around the country for short visits with local Catholic leaders. On a February trip to St. Louis, for example, he met with Archbishop Justin Rigali, and during a recent stop in Beaver, Pennsylvania, he visited with Pittsburgh Bishop Donald W. Wuerl. And at the end of March, the day before his speech at the John Paul II Cultural Center, Bush hosted some 60 cardinals, bishops, and Catholic leaders in the East Room of the White House.
Several Bush staffers are heavily involved in the Catholic strategy. The Republican National Committee (RNC) is reviving its Catholic Task Force, which will now include a staffer who concentrates on Catholic Hispanics. In the speech-writing shop, Michael Gerson, an evangelical with a keen understanding of Catholic teaching, has been joined by Peter Wehner, a former aide to GOP Catholic luminary Bill Bennett. In the public liaison office, Tim Goeglin, a former aide to Gary Bauer who later did religious outreach for the Bush campaign, serves as the point man for Catholics. One of his responsibilities is hosting a White House conference call, on Thursdays at eleven o'clock in the morning, with Catholic leaders-including Wagner, Hudson, Princeton's Robert George, and the Acton Institute's Reverend Robert Sirico, among others. (The weekly calls are separate from a Monday conference call with social conservatives because the White House has determined that religiously conservative evangelicals and Catholics are best dealt with as two completely different constituencies.) Hudson says the calls enable Catholics to help "shape policy and to influence personnel decisions." The calls played a role in torpedoing Montana Governor Marc Racicot's bid for attorney general (Racicot was deemed insufficiently anti-abortion) and, more recently, in ensuring that Jim Nicholson, a devout Catholic and former chairman of the RNC, was installed as ambassador to the Vatican rather than a campaign donor or lapsed Catholic.
Bush advisers like Hudson and Wagner see the administration's outreach to religious Catholics as a model for a broader effort to woo religiously active Hispanics and blacks as well. (Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, run by a born-again Catholic who works closely with urban black ministers, fits this larger strategy.) But an effort to position Republicans so explicitly as the Party of God carries political risks as well. As Wagner notes, it entails an emphasis on America's "moral crisis" and an unambiguous commitment to being pro-life-a position that there's "some institutional reluctance to fully embrace" in the GOP. That's an understatement: Many Republican strategists think that stressing abortion is crazy. More broadly, some worry that Bush's "values coalition" is fleeting, a product of Clinton-era sleaze combined with eight years of economic boom. "There is an argument to be made that when the economy is wonder- ful our emphasis shifts to other things, like values," notes Republican pollster Whit Ayres. The question, he says, is, "Can the shift toward an emphasis on values withstand a declining economy?" Looks like the White House will soon find out.
RYAN LIZZA is an associate editor of TNR.
Michael Pugliese