America Magazine's Election Blog

Curtains!

2008-11-07T06:24:00.000-08:00

This marks the end of America Magazine's special Election Blog for 2008.

The magazine's website will continue to run political, and other, commentaries in its "In All Things" blog, so be sure to check in there frequently.

Sarah Palin & The GOP's Future

2008-11-07T04:10:00.001-08:00

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession. I really like Sarah Palin.

Palin has been the focus of many post-mortems, most of it unfair. The only time the GOP was excited, or McCain led in the polls, was in the immediate aftermath of her selection as Veep and her debut speech at the Republican National Convention. She was spunky, attractive, could connect with the base and, even more importantly, she could caress the camera. Her convention speech was electrifying. And, the sight of a mother with five children, especially her “perfect” infant with Down’s Syndrome, was heart-warming to all but the nastiest of snobs.

Now, it turns out, Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent. And her experience as a governor was not only brief but exceptional: Alaska is not a typical state. When other governors have to balance budgets carefully, weighing the effects of a reduction in services versus a rise in taxes, Palin gets to decide how much of the state’s oil revenue should be distributed back to the citizens. The state has no income tax, no sales tax and no property tax. Palin has had little exposure to a broad swath of national policy issues because of Alaska’s differentness, but a stint as head of the Republican Governor’s Association would fill-in that deficit.

Palin’s performance in her first interview with Charlie Gibson was tenuous at best. Her follow-up with Katie Couric was a disaster. I do blame her handlers for most of this. Instead of trying to pretend that the physical proximity of Alaska to Russia was of any analytical value, or that her status as commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard provided her with a grounding in national security issues, her staff should have assured her that there is nothing wrong with saying, “Hey, I am a governor. We leave the foreign policy issues to the national government. And, I will be learning about those issues at the hands of a master, John McCain.” Instead, she came across as unintelligible and unintelligent, the perfect foil for a Saturday Night Live skit.

Still, those stumbles will be long forgotten in four years and will be easily attributed to her novice status. Her ability to connect with a crowd or a camera and her skill at delivering a stem-winder of a speech will remain.

Palin will also have something four years hence that she lacks today: chits. The day after the election, every state party chairperson faces the same immediate task of replenishing the coffers. And, if you are the state party chair in Ohio or Connecticut or Oregon, and you are thinking that for your big fundraising banquet next year, you want to charge $250 rather than $150 but are worried about whether or not you will be able to fill the room, call Palin. If you book her as your speaker, you will fill that room easily. The base of the party loves her and will open their checkbooks. This time next year, Palin will have acquired a lot of chits and will have the fundraising contacts that are the first step in any presidential bid.

As the GOP regroups from its devastating loss on Tuesday, and the Washington leadership of the party looks tired and out of ideas, Palin remains the one piece of exciting GOP news this year. Keep your eye on her. I would put money on the proposition that she will be their nominee in 2012.

Michael Sean Winters

Electoral Consequences Big & Small

2008-11-06T05:06:00.000-08:00

President-elect Obama ran a campaign that was arresting in its discipline. There were almost no leaks. But, in his very first twenty-four hours since the election, the news that he had offered the job of White House chief-of-staff to Cong. Rahm Emmanuel leaked to the press. This would have been fine if Emmanuel had accepted the job already but he understandably needs to discuss the matter with his family. So, the first major news about the next president has him waiting on someone else. Not good. Obama needs to have a stern talk with his new transition team and tell them to keep quiet or find work elsewhere, especially as the new administration takes shape.
Many Democrats were hoping to win a 60 vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and they fell short. This actually will help Obama. It forces him and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to negotiate with moderate Republicans like Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine, and those negotiations will help Obama govern from the center. As well, any resulting legislation will bear that all-important label "bi-partisan." Obama won the presidency by winning among Independent voters, voters who by definition resist partisan labels. Having to cross with 60-vote threshold with centrist Republican votes will help him beat back political pressures on the far left of the Democratic Party.
The strangest Senate result also gives Obama and Reid an opportunity. The good people of Alaska have evidently voted to re-elect long-time Sen. Ted Stevens, making him the first convicted felon to be sent to the Senate. The Democrats could be forgiven for wanting to let Stevens take his seat and serve as an on-going reminder of GOP corruption, and the GOP will not have the votes to expel him from the Senate on their own. But, Reid should insist that in exchange for getting Democrats to vote to expel Stevens from the Senate, he gets a big, big chit for an equal number of Republican votes on a major policy vote, say, health care reform.
Obama and the congressional Democrats have to answer a question: Do they want to govern for four years or for thirty? If they resist the efforts of liberal special interests to push legislation like the Freedom of Choice Act, centrist voters will bolt. If they studiously govern from the center, let the GOP show its most extreme side (see tomorrow’s post on the future of Sarah Palin), and demonstrate basic competence in the provision of services, Democrats can craft a governing coalition that could last a generation.

Among those who shifted from the red seats to the blue on Tuesday were religiously motivated voters. According to exit polls, Obama even increased his margins over Kerry’s numbers four years ago among those who attend church every week, a demographic that had become one of the clearest indications of voting behavior. "We see Roman Catholics being the very true swing voters -- going for Gore, then Bush, and now solidly for Barack Obama, some diversification in the white evangelical vote, and Obama making inroads among all religious attendance groups, with the largest increase among the more than weekly attenders," according to Dr. Robert Jones of Public Religion research who joined a conference call on the religious vote sponsored by the group Faith in Public Life yesterday. Indeed, Obama won Catholics 55%-44% a remarkable turnaround from 2004 when George Bush won 52% of all Catholics.
The images of people celebrating Obama’s win all around the world were heart-warming. Not so the stern unsmiling face of Russian president Dmitri Medvedev. Obama must brace himself for the hard fact that it is not in Russia’s or China’s or Iran’s interest to have a strong U.S. president, and that the leaders of these nations will act accordingly. Even here, though, it is impossible not to note Obama’s luck: the crashing price of oil will put huge strains on the Russian and Iranian societies which have been awash in petro-dollars.
Still, walking around the streets of Washington, D.C. yesterday, it was impossible not to notice a certain lightness in people’s steps, a greater readiness to smile to a stranger, and a pride that our nation had broken yet another barrier in her often uneven quest for equality. Last night, at the CVS, a group of fifty college students was camped out, quietly reading or talking, in the middle of the aisle. They were waiting for more copies of the Washington Post’s commemorative edition. When was the last time you saw college students waiting to get a newspaper?
Michael Sean Winters

Catholics & Our President-Elect

2008-11-05T05:02:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama’s landslide victory will require time sink in emotionally and also analytically. The exit polls will need to be adjusted to reflect the actual turnout: The numbers we had last night were skewed to the Democrats and under-counted Catholics I suspect. Still, some things are apparent.
The "faithful remnant" of the GOP is confined to those parts of the country that are the least Catholic: the deep South and the Prairie states. The states that are most Catholic – Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania - are also the states that are the bluest of the blue. Obama’s margin in Pennsylvania was the most impressive of any of the large contested states as he won there by eleven points. It is especially noteworthy that in Lackawanna County, home of Scranton bishop Joseph Martino who was one of the country’s fiercest episcopal critics of voting for Obama because of his views on abortion, Obama won 63% to 36%. This was an increase over John Kerry’s 2004 margin of 56% to 43% in Lackawanna. In neighboring Luzerne County, home of Wilkes-Barre, the numbers were similar: Obama took 54% of the vote, besting Kerry’s 51% four years ago.
Latino Catholics appear to have been decisive in flipping three states from red to blue: New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. Colorado’s nine electoral votes swung into the Obama column with a strong 53% to 46% win and in New Mexico the margin was even larger: 57% for Obama to McCain’s 42%. In Nevada, 55% of the vote went to Obama and McCain took 43%. If Obama delivers comprehensive immigration reform, these three states and their 19 electoral votes will be blue for a generation. They will also likely be joined by Arizona, which might have joined the shift this year had it not been for the home turf advantage McCain enjoyed. Nine points separated the candidates in Arizona, and the state’s ten electoral votes are low-hanging fruit for the Democrats next election.
Latinos are the fastest growing part of the electorate and young voters are just beginning to define their political loyalties. Obama won both groups convincingly: 67% of Latinos nationwide and 66% of voters age 18-29. That bodes well for the future of the Democratic Party.
Enough of the numbers. Watching our new President-Elect last night, I was struck by his bearing, his dignity. He did not seem overwhelmed by what had happened. In front of our very eyes, he shifted almost effortlessly from being the focus of the hopes of the Democrats to becoming the focus of the hopes of the nation. He recalled Ann Nixon Cooper, an Atlanta woman who is 106 years old and all the changes she had witnessed in her long life and what this election meant to her. He used her story to point to the future, wondering what changes his daughters might encounter if they were given such length of years. It was an elegant and organic moment that achieved the first task of political leadership: articulating the present circumstances by looking to history and finding in its lessons a narrative that points to the future.
It has been an amazing run and in the next few days we will continue to examine the consequences of the race before taking a break next week. Readers are encouraged to send in your election night stories and to write what this result means to you and what you believe it means for the country. Last night was a watershed and the air is filled with hopes but also questions this morning. The challenges that face our president-elect are mind-numbing for me, if not for him, but we can all look with anticipation at what awaits our nation around the corner of history.
Michael Sean Winters

Race & the Election

2008-11-04T04:41:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday, I worshipped at St. Augustine’s church here in Washington, D.C. It is the oldest congregation of black Catholics in the city. The pastor did not preach about the election: He didn’t have to. The anticipation in the room, the smiles, the nervousness, were all immediately obvious. I wondered how this congregation, which is very conservative, would have responded if they had been told that abortion was the only issue that mattered in this election? Yesterday, when I heard the audio of Bishop Finn of Kansas City saying that voting for Obama risked one’s eternal salvation, I wished he had come to St. Augustine’s to say that.

I wonder if Bishop Finn knows who Fannie Lou Hamer was and why today, election day, some of us will have this patron saint of electoral justice in the forefront of our minds. I wonder what Bishop Martino of Scranton would say to Bob Moses if he ran into him at the Au Bon Pain on Harvard Square. Black folk see this election in a different light, and they are not wrong to do so.

Yesterday, I called a black friend who is a priest and asked how he felt about this historic election. “I have my Obama cufflinks already to wear!” he exclaimed. “But, don’t print that until I have a diocese.” He broke out in a full-throttled guffaw. He, like most of the black clergy I know, is very conservative doctrinally but today’s election strikes a different, non-ideological chord. There was joy in his voice when we compared likely electoral college totals.

Today, America proves that race is not an insuperable barrier to political power and we deal a strong body blow to racism. That is an achievement per se. And the bishops who have insisted that abortion is the only issue, and that only their approach to the issue is morally permissible, they should think of Hamer and Moses and Dr. King and John Lewis today. It is not too difficult to say that while they may disagree with Sen. Obama about his pro-choice stance, and disagree forcefully, they join the rest of the nation in being properly thrilled that race is no longer an impediment to winning a presidential election in America. It is a great day to be alive. Everybody should be singing: This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Michael Sean Winters

Watching the Vote Totals

2008-11-04T04:17:00.001-08:00

Happy Election Day! My American flag is unfurled on the porch and I will be heading over to the Riverdale Elementary School once the morning rush dies down to cast my vote.

Of course, we know now that there is no more “election day.” Almost a third of the ballots have already been cast by early voting. These will not affect tonight’s exit polls: I am assured by George Stephanopoulos at ABC News that the exit polls will include phone polls of those who have already voted. (Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com says that exit polls are unreliable in any event, they lean Democratic, and predicted a big Kerry victory four years ago but that is a different story.) On such matters, no one is smarter than Stephanopoulos.

The early voting may not distort the exit polls but it does already tell us a lot about the final electorate in 2008. In Clark County, Nevada, we know that Democrats account for 52% of the 391,936 ballots already cast and Republicans account for 30.6% with 17.4% other or no affiliation. The total early votes represent 71% of the total 2004 vote in that county and Kerry carried it 52%-46%. So, we can figure out, I think, that Democrats are going to have a big turnout in Clark County and that it will go more heavily for Obama than it did for Kerry. In Florida, we know that of the more than 4 million votes already cast, 45.5% are from Democrats and 37.6% are from Republicans with 16.9% other or no affiliations. This is 53.8% of the total 2004 vote. So turnout is heavy in both states and the increased turnout among Democrats bodes well for Obama’s chances in these two states won by Bush four years ago.

Georgia has the most intriguing early voting data. Already, more than 2 million Georgians have cast their ballots. In 2004, 3.3 millions Georgians voted, so the early vote this year is already 60% of the total vote four years ago. Most significant is the racial breakdown in Georgia. In 2004, according to CNN exit poll, blacks were 25% of Georgia’s electorate while 70% were white. But, in 2008 early voting, only 60% are white and black turnout is 35.1% of early votes. That huge increase among black voters will not be unique to Georgia and you can expect record turnouts that break most pollsters models of “likely voters.” Will it be enough to turn Georgia, a state George W. Bush won by 17 points? I don’t know. But, in states that are less red but still have significant black populations from North Carolina to Indiana, I suspect that Obama will do better than the polls are predicting.

So, what to look for tonight? Polls close in part of Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. EST. But, don’t look for the networks to call Indiana quickly. You may recall that in the primaries, Hillary Clinton had a double digit lead when the early results came in, but the tally from the northwest corner of the state, where the polls close an hour later, narrowed the race considerably and she eked out a one-point victory. At 7 p.m., Virginia closes, a state where Obama has maintained a significant lead and a state where they report their vote early. If the networks call Virginia for Obama within the hour, McCain’s chances will be mighty slim. If McCain pulls off an upset in Virginia, it is going to be a long night. Georgia also closes its polls at 7 p.m. and if that state is not called for McCain within the first half hour, Obama is riding the wave.
So, where will we be this time tomorrow? And, when do you think the networks will call the race? I am predicting Obama will win with 381 electoral votes, as black turnout carries him to victories in swing states North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri, Latinos put New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada in his column, and a better ground game turns the more rural Big Sky states of North Dakota and Montana. And, the race will be called around 9:20 when Colorado is put into the Obama column. Readers are invited to post their predictions!

Michael Sean Winters

A First-Time Voter

2008-11-03T09:24:00.000-08:00

While most of the nation is gearing up to cast their ballots tomorrow, I am one of many Americans who have already cast their ballots. As a resident of Pennsylvania living outside the Commonwealth, I sent in an absentee ballot so that I could remain in Washington to see the results.

Casting my ballot was certainly not the first time that I have been involved in the political realm, as myself and many my age got involved in activism in high school. Technically, it was not even the first time I have voted (I turned 18 in January, enough time to vote in, and work the polls for, the Pennsylvania primary). But at the risk of sounding melodramatic, there was something special about voting in a presidential election; participating in an event that is only being performed for the 56th time in the history of this country. I recognize that around this time every election there are always stories written bemoaning the low-voter turnout in the United States, but as a recently enfranchised voter, I think that the point really does need to be made. At some point many voters no longer feel that voting is a significant action. It is an process that, though it concerns the common good, is all too often performed by a fraction of the population. Yet I feel as though it is not an overstatement to say that voting is a type of communion (small "c") for the American people. It is a collective action that is not merely symbolic, but real and appreciable; a ritual. It is ironic, perhaps, that the action that can effect the course of the entire society, the ultimate expression of public support or disapproval, is made in the confines of a private voting booth.

Though I acknowledge that my comments sound a little like Jimmy Stewart's filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I do not think that they are fueled solely by naivete or unjaded optimism. I sincerely believe that voting can effect policy, and hope that the American people realize the vital role they play. When the campaign rhetoric was at its best this election, both candidates made an effort to appeal to the civic responsibility that voting fulfills. To paraphrase a different sort of Constitution, we as citizens are called to "full, conscious, and active participation" in our electoral process. The work that this nation does depends on the willingness of its citizens to participate in the democracy, and I am proud to join the ranks of the enfranchised.

Alex Pazuchanics

Best (Or Worst?) Campaign Highlights

2008-11-03T04:38:00.001-08:00

There is no shortage of stupid campaign decisions, outrageously sleazy tactics, candidate meltdowns, and pitifully evasive debate replies. Picking the best – or is it worst? – such example is difficult because, as they say in the military, the environment is target rich. But here goes.

The award for the most pitifully evasive debate reply is a tie: Barack Obama and John McCain. Both men declined in two successive debates to answer how they might have to delay or alter their campaign pledges given the fact that the economic meltdown had drained the U.S. Treasury of an unanticipated $700 billion, to say nothing of the reduced tax revenue we can expect this year due to the recession. Both candidates danced and spinned but neither even approximated an answer. Joe Biden gets an honorable mention for suggesting a reduction in foreign aid, which is an entirely negligible part of the federal budget to begin with and is a cut that would offend no voters. Yeesh.

Worst candidate meltdown? Democratic Congressman Tim Mahoney from Florida rode to victory two years ago after incumbent GOP Representative Mark Foley got caught sending sexually suggestive emails to congressional pages. You would think Mahoney would have understood the ability of a sloppy personal life to adversely affect your career but….there he was, facing the cameras admitting multiple extra-marital affairs, although he denies firing an aide when their relationship went south and also denied paying $121,000 in hush money. Mahoney is now being sued for divorce and is on his way to an early retirement from the Congress. Good riddance!

The prize for the most ignorant attack came when GOP operatives accused the Obama campaign of “re-designing” the American flag to include a giant “O” for Obama, and placing these new flags behind Obama at a press conference. These GOP operatives thought the flag re-design was the height of hubris, an insult to America, another example of Obama’s elitism. Alas, the flag in question was the state flag of Ohio where Obama was holding his news conference.

The race for most outrageously sleazy campaign tactic was all ready to be engraved with Sarah Palin’s name for her infamous reference to “palling around with terrorists.” But, Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina topped that with an ad that implied her rival, Kay Hagen, went to a fundraiser sponsored by a group called “Godless Americans” when the group played no role in sponsoring it, although one of its members attended the event. The worst was yet to come: The ad finished with a photo of Hagen and a voice-over saying “There is no God!” But, the voice was not Hagen’s; it was just made to sound like hers. Now, that is sleazy.

Most stupid campaign decision? Not to vet Sarah Palin. Her near total ignorance of important national and international issues was an on-going thorn for the McCain campaign. While her many political gifts were apparent from the beginning, her lack of gravitas put McCain’s own judgment into question. The choice of a running mate is the one presidential-level decision a candidate makes, and McCain flubbed his.

So, dear readers, shout out with your best and worst campaign moments.

Michael Sean Winters

California Catholics Should Oppose Gay Marriage

2008-11-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

My fellow California Catholics will face a big decision Tuesday: whether to affirm or deny the traditional definition of marriage. The state’s voters will consider Proposition 8, an initiative that would overturn the state Supreme Court’s May 15 ruling to legalize same-sex marriage. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the state’s Catholics will likely play a pivotal role in its outcome:

Catholics, who make up nearly a quarter of likely voters, also could make a difference, DiCamillo said. Catholics opposed Prop. 8 by a 48 to 44 percent margin, but that's down from 55 to 36 percent a month ago.

When the Proposition 22 same-sex marriage ban was on the ballot in 2000, Catholics were split almost evenly in the final pre-election poll, DiCamillo said. But exit polls showed Catholics actually voting for Prop. 22 by 15 points.

"The Sunday before the election could be important, since people may hear priests and ministers preaching against same-sex marriage," he said.

My family and many of my friends still live in the Bay Area, and I am familiar with the arguments against Prop. 8. The chief argument is that marriage should be defined by an individual’s desires and wishes. In its majority opinion, the California Supreme Court wrote,

These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish – with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her live – an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage.

In the words of gay writer Andrew Sullivan, the terms of the court’s decision are a “watershed.” Previous marriage law had distinguished between gay and straight. The court’s ruling doesn’t. It posits that “the individual citizen … is defined as prior to his or her sexual orientation.”

Sullivan gets it half right. The court’s decision is a watershed, but not for the reason he described. The logic of the court’s decision, that of contractual law, is a common one in the legal world. Multiple parties discuss terms of a deal and sign a contract. Landlords and tenants operate on these terms, as do employers and employees. Whether the parties involved are gay or straight is irrelevant; the individual comes first.

What makes the court’s decision a watershed is not its logic, but rather its application.

Marriage had not been treated under the law as a purely private affair. It was understood to have private and public purposes. Marriage wasn’t just about the parties’ happiness; it was also about a common good – the begetting and proper raising of children. The gender of the parties, therefore, mattered. One party should be female, the other male. (Unsurprisingly, the California ruling severs the cord between marriage and children; as Sullivan notes, it establishes a definition of family “in which reproduction and children are not necessary.”)

Supporting this traditional understanding of marriage is reason enough to oppose gay marriage. As any Catholic knows, our private actions should be oriented toward the common good, especially as they the most vulnerable members of society. Just consider the consequences of no-fault divorce laws, which are governed by a contractual logic similar to that of gay marriage. These laws have harmed millions of children since their imposition 40 years ago. As Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill noted, if family structure had remained unchanged from 1970 to 1998, the child-poverty rate would have been 13.9 percent rather than 18.3 percent.

But there is also a specifically Catholic reason to oppose same-sex marriage. As Pope Benedict XVI points out, traditional marriage promotes authentic human freedom. It does this not as gay marriage does, by denying the real differences between men and women. Rather, it does this by affirming those differences and embracing them for their unitive and procreative ends. After all, what makes humans more free than becoming God-like, begetting children, and ensuring the future of humanity? As the California Catholic Bishops wrote in their statement in favor of Proposition 8,

we need to recall that marriage mirrors God's relationship with us-and that marriage completes, enriches and perpetuates humanity. When men and women consummate their marriage they offer themselves to God as co-creators of a new human being. Any other pairing-while possibly offering security and companionship to the individuals involved is not marriage. We must support traditional marriage as the source of our civilization, the foundation for a society that can be home to all human beings, and the reflection of our relationship with God.

The differences between the two types of marriage should be clear. Gay marriage represents, as Pope Benedict notes, “anarchic freedom.” Traditional marriage represents authentic freedom. This is in no way means that Catholics, or anyone, should disparage gay couples and their legitimate feelings. Yet California Catholics should understand the true nature of marriage, realize its implications, and vote accordingly.

Mark Stricherz

McCain's Collapsing Campaign

2008-10-31T04:46:00.000-07:00

One of the best aces in the hole for the Republican party has been their Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) operation. In 2004, I was working on a congressional race and the final weekend, an independent poll had the race tied but we lost by 8 points because the GOP deployed their famed 72-hour plan. Karl Rove had devised the 72-hour GOTV operation to make sure GOP voters got to the polls in critical swing districts. They made our GOTV efforts look like very amateurish as literally hundreds of GOP volunteers descended upon our district with state-of-the-art voter lists.

This morning’s Washington Post reports that the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee are putting less money into their GOTV efforts and using that money for a wave of final television ads aimed at late deciding voters. This decision may make sense for the McCain campaign: The only way they can win this is if virtually all the undecided voters break his way so raising doubts about Obama in the last weekend of the campaign is his only option. But, why would the RNC give up one of its strongest cards when it has House and Senate races on the ballot also?

I have always doubted the efficacy of television ads at the presidential level. There are so many ways to get independent information about the candidates, there is so much press coverage, the debates garnered a great deal of attention, people discuss the issues at the barber shop and in the grocery line. TiVo has even further diminished the reach of broadcast advertising. And, most ads run during local news programs, and those are the people who are most likely to be larger consumers of news and therefore have plenty of information about the candidates already.

Ads can accomplish some things. They can be used to fill in biographical details, which is one of the principal ways Obama has used them. They can be used to raise doubts about an opponent, which is the principal way the McCain camp has used them. Both tasks are better done earlier in the campaign.

The final weekend of the campaign is about building up enthusiasm among your supporters to make sure they get to the polls. That is why these huge Obama rallies bode so ill for McCain. The Obama campaign appears fired up. They have the most extensive GOTV organization in memory. And, in states with early voting, the people who attend the rallies go en masse to the local polls and cast their ballots.

One of the good things about our unnaturally long campaign process is that voters can tell how the candidate manages a large organization, what kind of strategic decisions they make, and how they implement those decisions. The McCain campaign has made a hash of some of its most important decisions from the vice-presidential selection to this latest decision to take resources away from the GOTV effort that they know has worked in the past. And the constant in-fighting within the McCain campaign continues to attract the press which loves to report on intramural warfare and prevents the campaign from getting its message out.

The Obama campaign, on the other hand, has been a model of strategic planning and execution. When was the last time you heard a story about in-fighting within the Obama camp? The emails and text messages from the campaign come regularly, advising people about how to register to vote, deadlines, upcoming events, etc. And the message of the campaign has been consistent across the long 18 months of Obama’s quest.

If the way you run a campaign tells us anything about how you will run the White House, Obama is looking better all the time.

Michael Sean Winters

Abortion and the 527s

2008-10-30T04:46:00.000-07:00

In 2004, a grassroots organization in Ohio called “Catholics for Kerry” asked the campaign to send a surrogate to one of their events. They were told, “We don’t do white churches.” Turns out, if you “don’t do white churches” you also don’t get to do the White House.

This year, you don’t have to ask twice if you are a religiously motivated voter and you want some attention from the Democrats. Several groups have sprung up to articulate and amplify those parts of Catholic social teaching that correspond with more progressive policies and they are taking to the airwaves to promote their message.

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good has been busy all election season, hosting conference calls with reporters, preparing voter guides and now running a campaign that includes billboards, print ads and most importantly an extensive radio campaign. For samples, click here. http://www.catholicsinalliance.org/ad-campaign. As you can guess from the group’s name, the ads focus on the need to replace the social Darwinism that has reigned in America lo these many years since Reaganomics first began its idolatry of the free market with social policies that bring people together. Solidarity, not competition, is the theme and it could scarcely be more resonant as the nation comes to grips with the greatest economic challenge since the Great Depression. The ad campaign is running in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Missouri.

The group Faith in Public Life is mounting a ten-state ad campaign on Christian radio stations. The ad states: “We need to ask ourselves what it really means to be pro-life and help move the conversation beyond bumper sticker slogans…It's time for Democrats and Republicans to come together around solutions based on results, not rhetoric. Please learn more by visiting http://www.realabortionsolutions.org/.” The website includes statements from a host of religious leaders about the need to find some common ground on abortion.

Matthew25.org has been busy on the airwaves also. This group is the brainchild of Mara Vanderslice, who won the hearts of many religiously motivated Democrats in 2004 when she cheerfully served in the often thankless job of religious outreach director for the Kerry campaign. They are more explicitly partisan – they have endorsed Obama - and they have been running ads for a couple of months on Christian radio, highlighting Obama’s faith as much as his policy positions, making him familiar to a largely evangelical audience.

Voices from the right have been busy as well. “Catholic Answers” is distributing voter guides again this year. Randall Terry, the pro-life activist, has issued a document called “Faithful Catholic Citizenship” that reflects what he calls “the authentic magisterium,” a not so subtle jab at the U.S. Bishops’ document “Faithful Citizenship.” He also has issued “An appeal to Catholic priests” – but viewer discretion is advised. In the video Terry stands before an altar and displays an aborted fetus, which struck this viewer as tasteless, turning a tragedy into a prop.

I am no believer in averting our gaze from the horror of abortion, but the issue between Catholics in Alliance and Randall Terry is not whether abortion is good or bad but how we can best approach the issue. Some were moved when they watched “Silent Scream” and others were repulsed, but in a democracy the key is to convince and to do so in a way that respects the views of those with whom we disagree. My friends on the Left and my friends on the Right disagree about how to advance the pro-life cause but both groups should enjoy the presumption of good faith in their earnestness to prevent abortion.

Michael Sean Winters

We Need a New Type of War on Poverty

2008-10-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

City Journal has a story arguing that the country does not need another war on poverty. Because LBJ’s War on Poverty treated the poor as victims rather than citizens, it fostered dependency rather than empowerment. Over at First Things’ blog, Amanda Shaw endorses author Stephen Malanga’s thesis:

The problem, of course, is that many things have been tried, and the unsuccessful ones are being dusted off and re-gifted to the American public; if we don’t know precisely what does work, we certainly do know what doesn’t.

One problem with Malanga’s and Shaw’s argument is its premise that “the federal government lost its War on Poverty.” This is highly misleading. Poverty rates actually fell in the 1960s. In 1960, more than a fifth of Americans were poor; in 1969, one in eight were. See the accompanying chart below.

Another problem with their argument is the claim that the Republican-led policies of the 1990s succeeded. Welfare reform took millions off the dole; new police tactics and strategies cut the crime rate. For all of the good that these policies achieved, they did not reduce the poverty rate significantly.

Yet if Malanga and Shaw are to be believed, the policies that reduced poverty failed, while those that have not succeeded. This is the logic of Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

It is largely true that Barack Obama’s anti-poverty proposals (and John McCain’s for that matter) would not help the poor much. Community Development block grants rarely bring jobs to a neighborhood; at best, they shore up the local housing stock. Extra spending on urban education, such as to build gold-plated schools, won’t raise student achievement much. Such programs are aimed more at middle-class political constituencies than the marginalized.

It is true that some of the War on Poverty’s policies failed. As Nicholas Lemann in The Promised Land pointed out, its maximum feasible participation clause posited a link between political and economic empowerment that does not exist. It might have given state and local officials the impression that they should make it easier to get and stay on welfare.

And it is true that some of Malanga’s proposals could reduce the poverty rate. More federal funds should go for prisoner re-entry programs and charter schools; tighter standards should be applied to federal public housing.

Yet Malanga is silent on why those policies work: acculturation. Their aim is to instill middle-class mores and habits into the down and out. For all of the talk about the poor’s economic needs, their cultural and spiritual needs are neglected. As this is an era of family breakdown, as Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have noted, such policies are doubly necessary. (These policies are also surely consistent with one of the goals of subsidiarity, the Catholic principle in which a “community of a higher order” (i.e. the federal government) supports but does not supplant a community of a lower order” (i.e. local government or agencies.)

Although the 1960s War on Poverty failed politically, one of its guiding principles did not. Unlike its 1990s counterpart, it conceived of the poor in their totality (or near totality). The elderly poor, the white rural poor, the black urban poor – all were included in its purview.

What the country surely needs now is a program with the best of the old and new: the scope of LBJ’s policies with an acculturation strategy aimed at bolstering the poor’s families and institutions.

Mark Stricherz

Is The Race Over?

2008-10-29T04:23:00.001-07:00

Is it over? Of course not. A single, dreadful news cycle could still turn the race quickly back towards McCain. But, the numbers are daunting to say the least.

The first problem for McCain is that virtually every competitive swing state is a state that George W. Bush carried last election. Put differently, all the states that John Kerry won in 2004 are solidly in the Obama camp. McCain continues to contest Pennsylvania, but Obama leads there by a margin of 52.1% to 41.6% according to the average of statewide polls published by RealClearPolitics.com (and from which all figures in this post are taken.) What is striking about the Pennsylvania spread is not only the fact that it is in double digits, but that Obama has cleared the 50% threshold. That means in the remaining days, McCain would have to convince voters who have already decided to back Obama to reconsider their choice and change their minds. That is tough to do this close to the election.

Other swing states tell a similar tale. In Colorado, Obama only leads by 6 points but he has 51.5% of the RCP average. In the critical state of Ohio, Obama’s numbers float just above, or just below, the majority line: in today’s average, Obama has 49.8% to McCain’s 43.4% but he would probably rather still have yesterday’s average which had him at 50.3% to McCain’s 44.3%. It is difficult to see how McCain will win either state unless Obama commits a game-changing self-inflicted wound.

In Florida, Obama leads McCain 48.4% to 45.1%. It is conceivable that all those who have not yet made up their minds could break to McCain, but it is doubtful. In Indiana, Obama’s lead is even narrower – 47.4% to 46.0%. In both states, McCain would only need to convince presently undecided voters to come his way, which is why his campaign is trying still to cast doubts about Obama’s readiness to lead.

The nationwide polls vary all the time but most of that is just white noise. They go up a little or down a little, but tracking polls have a relatively small daily sample size so such fluctuations are inherent in the exercise. As Nate Silver pointed out, on any given day, the tracking polls reflect the views of 3,539 respondents but the statewide polls that came out yesterday reflected more than 22,000 interviews. So, the statewide polls are likely to be more accurate. More importantly, the popular vote does not elect the president, the Electoral College does, so the statewide surveys are the only ones that matter.

The Obama campaign is relying upon heavy turnout from first-time voters, especially from those who have been under-represented in the past, especially poor blacks and young people. And, voting is not always an easy thing to do, as a story out of North Carolina shows.

So, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings as the saying goes. But, the fat lady is in her dressing room and she has just finished her make-up.

Michael Sean Winters

Palling Around With Neo-Nazis

2008-10-28T03:52:00.000-07:00

Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman were charged yesterday with threatening to assassinate Barack Obama. The two men are neo-Nazis and the craziness of their plot, from its fixation with numerology to its campy costuming (the two intended to wear white tuxedos and top hats while slaughtering Obama and 102 other black Americans) should not encourage us to ignore its hatefulness, and the sources of that hatefulness.

To be clear: No one technically “palled around” with these neo-Nazis. Sarah Palin did not go moose hunting with Cowart and Schlesselman, nor did her allies in the press nor her allies in the press, from Sean Hannity to Mark Stricherz, go bar hopping with the duo. There was no “palling around” because there was no casual relationship. There was something actually far worse: a causal relationship. For, surely, one of the mitigating factors Cowart’s and Sclesselman’s attorneys will point to is the fact that for several weeks a Governor of one of the fifty states, who had secured her party’s nomination for the vice-presidency of the nation, and a variety of serious media outlets had broadcast as newsworthy and significant the “fact” that Barack Obama “palled around” with terrorists.

We all know that terrorists are enemies of the United States so someone who “pals around” with them must at the very least be aiding and abetting the terrorists. Isn’t that what Palin meant to suggest? Young men and women wearing the uniform of the United States are engaged currently in two wars fighting terrorists who threaten our nation. Why should we stand idly by while one of the terrorists’ allies stealthily wins political support when our brothers and sisters are fighting against the same terrorists abroad?

You can hear the objection: We never told anyone to kill! We never told anyone to purchase a short-barreled shotgun, or two handguns, or a rifle and ammunition (all of which were found in Cowart’s and Schlesselman’s possession)! True enough. But, it requires a willful ignorance not to know that questioning the patriotism of the first black candidate for president might capture the attention of racist haters, that suggesting a casual connection between Obama and terrorism was a variety of hate-mongering, and that, long after it had been demonstrated that there was no meaningful relationship between Obama and Ayers, continuing to raise the issue amounted to shouting “fire” in a crowded arena. You can drive one hour from our nation’s capital (to the north or south, I might add) and find KKK and other racist memorabilia. The arena of racism is a crowded one and shouting “fire” is literally incendiary.

I do not believe that any of those who rehearsed the Ayers story wanted Obama dead. I also believe that their language was designed to raise doubts in some, even at the risk of raising hate in others. Such language is most certainly not exculpatory for these neo-Nazis, but is certainly a mitigating factor. I recognized all along, what Mr. Cowart and Mr. Schlesselman did not recognize, that the Ayers story was merely an attempt at character assassination, not real assassination. It was merely a revival of McCarthyite smear tactics, but no one told the neo-Nazis it was just a smear campaign. The confusion should not let Cowart and Schlesselman off the hook for their criminal acts and intents, but neither should it excuse the shameful acts and intents of those who stoked their hate.

Michael Sean Winters

The "Real" America?

2008-10-28T03:15:00.000-07:00

The last several weeks have seen an increasingly more vicious ratcheting up of the rhetoric between the campaigns and their surrogates. In particular, comments made by three Republican women over the last 10 or so days has created a controversy . On Thursday of last week, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin said the following at a campaign rally: "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation". That same day, Representative Michele Bachman, a Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota, said that there were "anti-American" members of Congress, implying that there was a connection between "liberal" and "anti-American". Later that weekend, Nancy Pfotenhauer, a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign, referred to the parts of Virginia outside of Northern Virginia as "real Virginia".

All three of these statements, and the defenses made on behalf of them in the subsequent days indicate a dangerous trend in political name-calling. Democrats have gotten used to certain names thrown at them by Republicans (East Coast/West Coast/ Massachusetts Liberal, Big City Boss), but to call the very spaces that they are from "un-American" or not "real" America is to go beyond the pale. It is a new breed of geographic McCarthyism that exacerbates the already tenuous divide between red states and blue states.

What exactly is meant by "real" or "pro-" America? One of my favorite sites for political information, fivethirtyeight.com, provided an interesting demographic definition. Using information from the US Census, statistician Nate Silver looked at the ethnic make-up of the cities visited by Palin and Obama since the time that Palin was announced as the VP nominee. Interestingly enough, most were whiter than the US population as a whole, and most were smaller communities instead of big cities.

Palin, whether she intended to or not, was framing urban America as something not quite "American". Pfotenhauer did likewise by suggesting that Northern Virginia, including the urbanized areas of Arlington and Alexandria, were somehow less Virginian than the rest of the Commonwealth.

The bias against the urban space is not new. From the days of Jefferson, there has been an idealized version of America that focuses on rural and small town life. The Republican party has used anti-urban rhetoric with varying degrees of success over the last 150 years. For example, fear of "urban" Democrat Al Smith was effective in contributing to his loss in the 1928 election. Sometimes the strategy backfires, however. In 1884, The Republican criticism of the Democratic Party as the party of "rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" enraged New York City Catholics to the point that they handed the Republicans their first loss in the presidential race since the Civil War.

Coming from a suburb of a Midwestern city to the BosWash Megalopolis, I have found that the Eastern Seaboard is in no way less "American" than the part of the country I come from. In fact, its heterogeneity and multiplicity of ideas (including some that may occasionally be unpopular) makes it American. The diversity that makes up a place like Northern Virginia speaks to the way that people with different cultural histories can come together and provide individuality within community. Catholics, with our historic American roots in the urban space, know this fact better than others, and should be the first to defend the diversity of the city not as "un-American", but simply a part of the American experience.

As McCain and the Republicans get more desperate, I would anticipate more tactics of this nature. Playing on anti-urban bias, particularly against a candidate who made his political name on the South Side of Chicago, will become a more desirable action as the election draws closer. In an attempt to rally the base, the Republicans will try to play to the apprehension rural and suburban voters have for urban lifestyles. The best we can hope for is that all voters can see beyond the "un-American" label to cast their ballots on the issues.

Alex Pazuchanics

Should Archbishop Chaput Criticize McCain?

2008-10-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I argued that Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput’s criticisms of Barack Obama have been misunderstood as partisan. In response, reader Joseph J. Cleary II wrote:

When the church leadership takes the jump from enunciating clear moral policy to “implying” political votes for a party or candidate, they inevitably miss the mark.

I take Cleary’s point: church leaders should not imply votes for or against any candidate. To do so would be to violate the spirit of church consensus. As Michael Sean Winters noted accurately, The bishops’ document "Faithful Citizenship" says, "In fulfilling these responsibilities, the Church’s leaders are to avoid endorsing or opposing candidates or telling people how to vote.”

Yet contra Michael, Chaput has not urged Catholics to vote against Obama. Instead, the archbishop has criticized the Democratic candidate’s position on abortion, as well as his supporters. Opposing a candidate and criticizing his policies one are not the same. Criticism means disapproval; it doesn’t mean opposition. Most of us criticize candidates regularly; this doesn’t mean we won’t vote for them.

Naturally, this raises the question: Why hasn’t Archbishop Chaput criticized John McCain for his support of another evil -- federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. Last month, Fran Maier, the chancellor of the Denver archdiocese, explained the archbishop’s decision this way:

In fact, the archbishop has voiced his criticism of embryonic stem cell research directly to Sen. McCain. He’s had no similar invitation or opportunity to meet with Sen. Obama. Moreover, the Republican Party platform rejects embryonic stem cell research. In fact, anyone interested in the contrasts between the two party platforms on this and related life issues simply needs to compare them.

Fran’s words invite questions. Would Chaput not have criticized Obama publicly if he had agreed to meet with the archbishop? Did Obama reject Chaput’s offer to meet with the archbishop?

In my reading of the evidence, Chaput is not a partisan. But surely he could explain his position about public criticism of candidates and their positions on various evils more fully.

Mark Stricherz

What October Surprise?

2008-10-27T05:12:00.000-07:00

Democrats had been worried about an "October Surprise" in which the GOP would mount some kind of foreign policy crisis to scare the electorate and stimulate support for John McCain. Well, yesterday, U.S. forces crossed an international boundary to pursue terrorists into Syria. I read about it this morning on page A9 of the Hartford Courant. So, much for the October Surprise.

Michael Sean Winters

Prelates Meltdown

2008-10-27T05:05:00.000-07:00

First Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput criticized Democratic nominee by name and suggested that those who support him have “done a disservice to the Church, confused the natural priorities of Catholic social teaching, undermined the progress pro-lifers have made, and provided an excuse for some Catholics to abandon the abortion issue…”

Then, Scranton Bishop Joseph Martino interrupted a forum trying to discuss the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ document “Faithful Citizenship.” That document was adopted by the entire hierarchy last November with 97.8 percent of the bishops voting in favor of its passage. But, according to Bishop Martino "No USCCB document is relevant in this diocese…The USCCB doesn't speak for me."

Now, Bishop Rene Gracida, the retired bishop of Corpus Christi, has made a commercial that states no Catholic can vote for a pro-abortion candidate and that “Barack Hussein Obama is a pro-abortion candidate.” Bishop Gracida, you may recall, made such a mess of his diocese that he found himself in civil court being sued by his brother bishops in Texas. And, his radio ad is being distributed by Randall Terry, famous for starting Operation Rescue. “I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you,” Terry said in 1993. “I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good.... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism.” Charming.

Bishop Gracida and Terry deserve each other. It is hard to believe that the reference to Obama’s unfortunate middle name served any useful, still less Christian, purpose. But, while they may at the bottom of the slope, Chaput and Martino are on the same slope: They fail to see why it is inappropriate for clergy to endorse candidates by name.

It is undoubtedly the role of the hierarchy and clergy to help the laity form their conscience. But, selecting a candidate is the end of the process of conscience formation. The prelates have allowed their concern for abortion, which is understandable, to color their assessment of the value of different approaches to the issue, which is up for debate, leading them to oppose Obama by name in public, which is inappropriate.

Why is it inappropriate? The bishops’ document “Faithful Citizenship” says, “In fulfilling these responsibilities, the Church’s leaders are to avoid endorsing or opposing candidates or telling people how to vote. As Pope Benedict XVI stated in Deus Caritas Est, ‘The Church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly, even when this might involve conflict with situations of personal interest. . . . The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible.’”

But, there is another reason. Voters have to assess not only a set of policy positions but the character of the candidates. The three prelates dismiss the distinction the Obama has drawn between being pro-choice and being pro-abortion. Given the history of the Democratic Party on the issue, their suspicion is understandable: could Obama merely be giving lip-service to abortion reduction? But, what to make of John McCain “straight talk” when he says that he believes life begins at conception and, in the very next breath, affirms his support for embryonic stem cell research? Which would be better for the pro-life cause: a sincere Obama who promotes abortion reduction or a cynical McCain who does only what is needed to manipulate pro-life voters? Maybe Obama is not sincere and maybe McCain was as confused as Nancy Pelosi when discussing embryonic stem cell research. It is up to voters to make such determinations, not prelates.

In the end, the stance of Chaput, Martino and Gracida harkens back to the days when the laity were expected to “pray, pay and obey.” But, we lay people will not be infantilized. I saw 100,000 people fill downtown Denver yesterday to cheer on Obama. Their archbishop should realize that his approach is ill-advised for another reason: It is not working.

Michael Sean Winters

Misunderstanding Chaput (UPDATE)

2008-10-24T07:55:00.001-07:00

Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput is getting no love, to use the parlance of the day, from progressive Catholics. Doug Kmiec implies that Chaput is biased against Democrats, saying that he "singles out" their policies for criticism. Michael Sean Winters writes that Chaput is “the second most vocal supporter of the GOP.” Journalist David Gibson suspects that "the bottom of [Chaput's] argument is that a Catholic cannot vote for Obama." All three statements are mischaracterizations. And it reflects, I think, a larger misunderstanding that progressive Catholics have about their co-religionist opponents.

Chaput’s basic opposition is to political candidates who support Roe v. Wade. As he wrote in August,

Obviously, we have other important issues facing us this fall: the economy, the war in Iraq, immigration justice. But we can’t build a healthy society while ignoring the routine and very profitable legalized homicide that goes on every day against America’s unborn children. The right to life is foundational. Every other right depends on it. Efforts to reduce abortions, or to create alternatives to abortion, or to foster an environment where more women will choose to keep their unborn child, can have great merit—but not if they serve to cover over or distract from the brutality and fundamental injustice of abortion itself … Yet for thirty-five years I’ve watched prominent “pro-choice” Catholics justify themselves with the kind of moral and verbal gymnastics that should qualify as an Olympic event. All they’ve really done is capitulate to Roe v. Wade.

This position is not, strictly speaking, Republican or Democratic. It was also the late-career position of Robert P. Casey, Sr., the late Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. On the third day of the 1992 Democratic convention, Casey organized a full-page ad in The New York Times which called Roe “the most momentous act of exclusion in our history.” Casey also opposed the re-election of Mark Singel because Singel, in a reversal of his previous position, came out for Roe.

In addition, Chaput’s position echoes that found in the Catechism:

The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation:

… The moment a positive law deprives a category of human beings of the protection which civil legislation ought to accord them, the state is denying the equality of all before the law. When the state does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen, and in particular of the more vulnerable, the very foundations of a state based on law are undermined. . . . As a consequence of the respect and protection which must be ensured for the unborn child from the moment of conception, the law must provide appropriate penal sanctions for every deliberate violation of the child's rights."⁸¹

Now, our two parties have official positions about Roe. The Republican’s platform calls for the passage of a human life amendment, which if enacted would reverse Roe; the Democrats’ platform calls for preserving Roe. Naturally, the archbishop has made a descriptive statement about the GOP: that on cultural issues the GOP is “the natural ally” of the church.

It is true that Chaput has criticized pro-choice Democrats, such as Barack Obama. But that's because they favor abortion rights, not because they are Democrats.

Yet Chaput has made no prescriptive statements about the Republican Party; he has not endorsed, or even praised, one of their candidates for office. In fact, he said in an interview that “we are not with the Republican Party. They are with us.” That’s hardly the statement of a GOP booster.

If Chaput were a GOP supporter, he would say nice things about a Republican pro-life candidate instead of a pro-life Democratic one. Chaput said no such thing. For example, he didn’t imply support in 2006 for Bob Beauprez, the Republican opponent of Bill Ritter, the pro-life Democratic gubernatorial candidate (and now the state’s governor).

If Chaput were a GOP supporter, he would have said nice things about Rudy Giuliani, who was a leading Republican presidential candidate this year. Chaput said no such thing. Instead, he told Newsweek that Catholics would have to discuss their options:

"What if a candidate were right on all the issues except racial discrimination?" asked Denver's archbishop, the Most Rev. Charles Chaput. "Why isn't [abortion] as important as that?" If Giuliani is the nominee, Chaput says, Catholics will have to choose between the lesser of two evils or stay home from the polls in protest.

For what it is worth, I suspect that the archbishop is a Democrat. He invited me to give the annual Bob Casey lecture at the archdiocese. In talking with him, I learned that he is as much of a strong pro-life Democrat as Casey himself. As a young seminarian, he worked as an “active volunteer” for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968. He supported Jimmy Carter’s presidential bids in 1976. He opposed the Iraq war and some of the GOP’s attempts at cracking down on illegal immigration.

Chaput has offered encouragement to Catholics who oppose abortion but don’t seek to criminalize the procedure. But his position, as well as that of Casey, is that overturning Roe is foundational.

This makes sense to me. Consider the issue of slavery. In 1857, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott declared that black Americans were the property of their masters. Was it really possible to oppose slavery but favor Dred Scott?

This is a question that I think that progressive pro-lifers need to ask.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the pro-life committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement Tuesday that criticized the notion that seeking to reduce the abortion rate was a sufficient pro-life strategy.

Mark Stricherz

What d'ya mean "Land Line?"

2008-10-24T03:46:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons that the polls have shown such big differences is their methodology. Some include cell phone-only voters but most don't. It makes a difference.

Michael Sean Winters

The Economy is a Moral Issue

2008-10-24T03:26:00.001-07:00

The conventional wisdom about the 2008 election is nearly unanimous. John McCain closed the gap with Barack Obama when he emphasized cultural and moral issues, especially in his vice-presidential choice of Sarah Palin who put some lipstick on the often angry face of social conservatism. But, the Wall Street meltdown in late September moved moral issues aside. With the nation fixated on the economy, Obama opened up a large lead in the polls that seems destined to carry him to victory.

The conventional wisdom is not exactly accurate. (As is often the case, only Chris Matthews gets it right.) The economy did not displace moral issues: The economy is a moral issue. Providing for one’s family is a moral obligation, one that is suddenly uncertain. Buying a house and making the mortgage payments is a moral accomplishment, requiring discipline and delayed gratification. Faulty economic theories were part of the reason for the credit crunch, but greed has played its part. The anger felt on Main Street is not mere anti-elitism: The barons of high finance treated people’s hard-earned life savings as mere fodder for risk-taking. An economy that had been characterized by an idolatrous worship of the laws of the market suddenly sees the need for social solidarity in the form of government bailouts.

The economic crisis, in short, is more than an economic crisis. It is a cultural crisis, even a spiritual crisis. Years of easy credit and easy living had put a hefty materialistic id into most people’s identity. In the rush to acquire the latest technological gizmo from Ipods to Iphones, our culture defined success in terms of expensive stuff. The heroes of that culture had houses in the Hamptons, Mercedes-Benzes in the driveway, and lobbyists on K Street creating ever larger tax breaks for their companies. Magazines like Architectural Digest ceased to be about the aesthetics of architecture and instead became a kind of glossy consumer pornography, filled with photos of the latest, niftiest advances in creature comfort, none of it particularly beautiful.
Most importantly, an entire nation that had been led to believe that the good life could be charged ("Life takes Visa!" proclaimed the ad) suddenly had to ask itself what really mattered. The gods of Mammon have been pulled down from their pedestals. What will take their place?

Americans are not sure what they want, but they know they want a change and they have turned to the candidate who has made his name synonymous with change for 18 months of his long campaign. Obama has economic proposals at the ready, but it remains to be seen if he can help Americans answer this larger question: What matters? To him falls the task of re-negotiating the social contract, a task that is as enormous as it is infrequent. How will he inspire the country to take off in a new direction and what will that direction be? How can he lead the nation to meet not only its economic challenge, but the cultural and spiritual challenge posed by the economic downturn?

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced similar socio-economic challenges and he responded with the New Deal, a phrase he unveiled in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. "What do the people of America want more than anything else?" FDR asked in that same speech. "To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security--security for themselves and for their wives and children. Work and security--these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values."

These more homely values are easily forgotten among the policy-making and policy-shaping classes. Candidates, their aides, their policy advisors and the media that cover them, all enjoy the kind of professional success that permits them not to worry about meeting the mortgage payments. But, Obama started to channel FDR last Saturday in St. Louis when he said, "It comes down to values – in America, do we simply value wealth, or do we value the work that creates it?" He should listen to Roosevelt’s fireside chats in the days and months ahead: Despite his patrician roots, FDR addressed the anxieties of all Americans with an almost unique mix of confidence and solidarity.

Abortion, gay marriage, immigration policy, our militaristic foreign policy and a host of other moral issues still matter to Americans. To some they are still decisive. But, for most Americans, their more primordial moral concern for home and hearth has come to the fore. Like FDR, Obama must find the political opportunity in the current crisis, and that opportunity is deeper than flipping Virginia and Ohio from red state to blue. It is time to re-draw the social contract to reflect values greater than acquisitiveness. It is time to create a tax structure and a regulatory scheme that rewards work other than the creation of "financial instruments" that bear a remarkable resemblance to a ponzi scheme. It is time to promote social solidarity through universal health insurance and better worker-retraining programs for those displaced by global competition. Obama must articulate this moral vision that animates his economic program, a moral vision that speaks to and for those in middle America who have been struggling for a long time.

Michael Sean Winters

The Politics of Abortion: Live from Philly

2008-10-23T07:12:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I will be doing a discussion of the politics of abortion in the 2008 election on WHYY's "Radio Times." The host is Marty Moss-Coane and we will be joined by Amy Sullivan from Time magazine. Be sure to tune in on the radio or online. It airs live from 10-11 AM.
Michael Sean Winters

CUA's Panel on the Catholic Vote

2008-10-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

We had a panel discussion at Catholic University yesterday on the Catholic Vote in the 2008 election. You can see it on C-Span by clicking here.

The central question was this: Is there a “Catholic vote” anymore and, if so, what will drive it in the 2008 election cycle? The different panelists had their own opinions on this question, but the one point of consensus was that we don’t really know yet and won’t know until we get the exit polls on election night. There are a lot of shifting templates in the geography of this election, some of them tectonic like the historic tension between white, ethnic Catholics and African-Americans, and some of them ephemeral like how much Sarah Palin spent on her wardrobe.

One of the biggest questions is whether or not young people will turn out. There is convincing data to show that young Catholics, and indeed most young Americans, break disproportionately for Obama. Young evangelicals remain more firmly entrenched in the GOP column, but they are the exception not the rule. While pollsters and statisticians are understandably wary of high-end projections of youth turnout, which we have seen before but it has never quite panned out, I think this year will be different. Young people know that this year they can make history. Voting for Al Gore in 2000 would have set the country on a far different course from the one George W. Bush has taken us but no one at the time felt that voting for Gore was “taking part in history.” If Obama wins, all Americans (except the racists) will have to feel good about the fact that race was no impediment to his attaining the highest office in the land. Even if you think his policies will be a disaster for the country, breaking down racial and ethnic barriers is an undeniably good thing and an undeniably American thing.

There was a great deal of discussion about the abortion issue and how it will play. After the panel, a young woman came up to ask me if I knew that Barack Obama intended to increase the number of abortions in this country. She was bristling with hostility. I said during the panel that I think one of the reason Obama has to deliver on his pledge to find common ground on abortion is that so many of us are tired of the two sides shouting at each other, and part of his political persona is that he can be a bridge builder. And, if he wins, we pro-life Democrats must keep his feet to the fire on his pledge.

The emergence of Catholic Latinos as a critical voting bloc was also a focus of much attention. They are the fastest growing demographic in the entire electorate and they are already decisive in such key swing states as Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. If the next president delivers on humane immigration reform, he will earn the loyalty of the Latino vote for his party for a generation.

Catholics this year will lean blue like the rest of the country but they remain a distinctive voting bloc, with different cultural reference points, different historical family narratives &c. For too long Democrats ignored this distinctiveness, but Obama seems to get it. It may help him get to the White House and, even more, it may help him build a governing coalition once he gets there.

Michael Sean Winters

2008-10-22T04:00:00.000-07:00

Who speaks for the Church in the realm of politics?

The question has been the subject of some controversy in recent days. Bishop Martino in Scranton showed up at a politics forum that was discussing the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference document “Faithful Citizenship.” Instead of commending his flock for listening to, and discussing, the bishops’ instruction, he denounced the text: “The USCCB does not speak for me,” he thundered.

Of course, the question has a perennial quality to it. Whether or not you can put lipstick on a pig, you can’t just plunk the label “Catholic” on an organization and make it so. There is a group “Catholics for a Free Choice” that really does not seem to evidence any awareness of Catholic anthropology. Conversely, I watched EWTN the other night and was appalled at their “more Catholic than the Pope” attitude towards the faith as well as the amateurish understanding of politics evidenced by host Raymond Arroyo. In their thirst for nostalgia they seem to have ignored such basic and observable phenomena as the fact that Pope Benedict did not bar anyone from the communion rail during his visit to America last April.

Archbishop Chaput of Denver made sure the audience he addressed last Friday night understood that in his comments criticizing Barack Obama and his Catholic supporters, he was not speaking as an archbishop but as a “private citizen.” Of course, the Catholic women’s group who invited Chaput did not invite any other private citizens as their guest speaker. “Thou art a priest forever, by the order of Melchizadech” sings the psalmist, except, evidently, when you choose to speak as a private citizen. Clerics are entitled to their political opinions, of course, but it is smoke and mirrors to give a public speech “as a private citizen” when wearing a pectoral cross.

A voting guide put out by the group “Catholic Answer” not only claims it is speaking for the Church, but that there is only one answer to whatever conceivable questions you have. The voting guide issued by the liberal Catholic group “Catholics United” has a more balanced approach, analyzing the candidates’ positions on a variety of issues. But, neither organization has a canonical mission so while both can be consulted (and the “Catholics United” voter guide is well done), they do not carry any kind of ecclesiastical imprimatur. Communion and Liberation does have a canonical mission, and its voter guide is the best of the bunch: It is relentlessly abstract.

Relentless abstraction has its place. The same night the Bishop of Scranton was denouncing his confreres, I attended a presentation by Msgr. Stuart Swetland for the group Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS). He gave a fine and even-handed presentation of the Church’s teachings. In the Q-and-A, someone asked for whom he was going to vote and he declined to answer. “I think it is a mistake when a priest indicates who is going to vote for,” he said. “You all have to decide for yourselves how to apply the Church’s teachings to the concrete circumstances of the election.”

So, who speaks for the Church at election time? You do. We all do.

Michael Sean Winters

Election Prep in Washington

2008-10-22T03:59:00.000-07:00

With the possible exception of Wasilla, no American city has gotten greater play in this election cycle than Washington DC. "Washington", as it is described by the candidates, represents all that is wrong with American government. It is an insult to be labeled a "Washington insider"; being associated with DC has become a scarlet letter.
After living most of my life in what most would consider the "heartland" (Pittsburgh, PA), I embarked to this town to study at the George Washington University about two months ago. Contrary to the popular portrayal of "Washington elites" in the media, what I found was a lot of people just like me. Most people on the street are very friendly, and though it's occasionally a hassle to have your walk home disrupted by the presidential motorcade or the ambassador of some country, the capital is in many ways just a normal, American city.
However, one of the unique factors of going to school in a the city of Washington is that there are very few people who are actually "from Washington" (though there are a fair number who hail from suburban enclaves in Maryland and Virginia). I have met people from across the country (and across the globe) who chose to attend school in Washington, and others who have gravitated to DC after college. The diversity leads to a lot of different perspectives on the presidential race, and also a lot of knowledge about Senate and Congressional races all across the country.
Though the District of Columbia's 3 electoral votes are hardly in play, the capital is an incredible place to be when preparing for an election. DC is across the Potomac from Virginia, and students from most of the DC universities (including both the College Democrats and College Republicans) have been canvassing Northern Virginia for over a month. On GW's campus, both organizations have had multiple speakers in preparation for the election. Hundreds of students have attended watch parties for the presidential debates. The weeks immediately before the election promise to be even more active, with phone-banking and last minute canvassing trips to North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
As the country gets ready to elect the new president, my classmates and I prepare to greet our new neighbor three blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Alex Pazuchanics, GWU

Key Swing Voters: Young Catholics & Hispanic Evangelicals

2008-10-21T04:18:00.000-07:00

The election is only two weeks away. You can expect the national polls to get a little tighter as we get closer to election day and undecided voters make their decision. Political theorists have different theories about how late deciding voters will break, but the truth is that most times, most people vote the way they did last time. This bodes well for McCain.

What doesn’t bode well for McCain is that the percentage of voters who are undecided or leaning his way is less than 50 percent. Put differently, nationally and in most of the key swing states, Obama has crossed the 50% threshold. So, even if his five-to-seven point lead dwindles to a three point lead, he still wins if the election ends up 51% to 48%.

Obama’s strength in the polls is the result of a couple of key swing constituencies turning blue this year. Two recent polls by the organization Faith in Public Life focused showed Obama winning the support of young Catholics and Hispanic evangelicals by decisive margins. Older Catholics (age 35 and up) divide evenly between McCain (46%) and Obama (44%) but Catholics aged 18-35 broke for Obama by a margin of 55% to 40%. In states with large concentrations of Catholic voters, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, this emerging generational divide could make the difference.

The second poll looked at the opinions of Hispanic evangelicals. This is a group that broke overwhelmingly for George W. Bush in 2004, 63 % to John Kerry’s 37%. This year, however, the poll showed Obama garnering 50% of the Hispanic evangelical vote to McCain’s 34%. Latino evangelicals are only a third of the total Hispanic vote, and they lag slightly behind their Catholic brethren in support for Obama. But, Bush won 44% of the total Latino vote in 2004 and McCain will be lucky to win a third. This swing among Hispanic voters is critical to Obama’s apparent lead in Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

The reasons for the switch among young Catholics are many and varied but the change in Latino evangelical voting is directly related to the GOP’s anti-immigrant posture. Not only do Latinos overwhelmingly support humane immigration reform, but 77% of Latino evangelicals link their views on immigration to their religious beliefs. In short, the GOP’s careful cultivation of the “party of religion” label is unconvincing to Latinos who have read in Leviticus that we are called to welcome the stranger. These voters remain suspicious of the Democrats: Obama has not addressed the immigration issue in the direct, values-laden way these voters see it. But, they know that McCain backtracked from his previous support for a path to citizenship for undocumented workers in his effort to win the GOP nomination. He threw them, and their families under the bus.

Immigration is a different kind of political issue from debates over the federal budget deficit or the environment. The impact is direct and immediate on a distinct portion of the electorate. If the Democrats embrace humane immigration reform, they will win the political loyalty of Latinos for a generation or more. That could put Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico in the Democratic camp for a long time and the GOP will have to find a different route to that magical number of 270 electoral votes.

Michael Sean Winters

The "Free" Market Did Not Fail

2008-10-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks, a number of commentators – including several prominent Catholic writers – have announced the "death" of free-market capitalism. These reports are often tinged with a bit of "I told you so" smugness, and laced with the satisfaction that so often comes with the conviction that one was "right all along."

These reports are inaccurate, though – at least, we should hope that they are.

To be clear, the purist-libertarian fantasy of Ayn Rand novels and the early Rush albums is not what we have (thank goodness). Indeed, as the Washington Post editorializes today, the "market that failed" was not free: "We are not," the Post observed, "witnessing a crisis of the free market but a crisis of distorted markets." This is true, and it is true of many of the social and policy problems that are often chalked up to excessive economic freedom. The housing market and the credit environment – like, for example, the agricultural sector and so many others – are not unregulated, they are not arenas in which incentives operate, prices are set, and risks are taken without interference by government. Even in our "free" markets, regulation is ubiquitous.

As we move forward, and no matter who wins the election, let’s remember this fact: Reasonably-regulated-but-largely-free markets are tremendous forces for good and engines of creativity worth celebrating and protecting. The world needs more of them, not fewer. To be clear: to say this is not to deny the importance of government’s task, or to baptize selfishness, or to deny the overriding public obligation to the common good. It is merely to join the late Pope John Paul II in insisting that the great principles of the Catholic Social Thought tradition – including a "preferential option" for the poor, and "solidarity" among all persons – are likely to be best realized through the responsible exercise of human freedom – including economic freedom – and not through centralized command-and-control schemes.
Rick Garnett

Powell's Endorsement Doesn't Matter

2008-10-20T04:25:00.001-07:00

Newscasters were swooning over the news that Colin Powell was endorsing Barack Obama. Powell served George Bush #41 as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Bush #43 as Secretary of State, so the endorsement was certainly newsworthy. But, it doesn’t make much of a difference at this point.

For all the focus on endorsements, the limited power of surrogacy has been shown again and again in this campaign. When Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama in January, experts predicted Kennedy would be able to deliver the Latino vote in California on Super Tuesday. Hillary Clinton not only won the Latinos in California, she won Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts as well. Hillary Clinton had the early support of such prominent black congressional leaders as John Lewis and Stephanie Tubbs Jones, but they couldn’t deliver the black vote.

There was a time when the endorsement of a labor union really mattered and at the local level, the financial and organizational strength of unions is still important, especially in Democratic primaries. But, the union vote supported Ronald Reagan in 1980, Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers Union the next year, and yet he still won the support of most union households in 1984. Many blue collar workers today are ambivalent about supporting Obama.

Catholic bishops fare no better. For the past four years, no bishop has been more vocal in his opposition to the Democratic Party than Archbishop Raymond Burke, who served in St. Louis from 2004 until this past June when he was appointed to a desk job in Rome. This past weekend, St. Louis produced the largest crowd of the campaign so far, when 100,000 people turned out to cheer on Barack Obama. This beat the record of 84,000 set in Denver, home to the nation’s second most vocal supporter of the GOP, Archbishop Charles Chaput. Ever since Scranton’s Bishop Joseph Martino announced Joe Biden was barred from receiving communion in his diocese, Pennsylvania has been turning bluer and bluer.

There is one group of surrogates who really matter: average people. At this point in a campaign, an undecided voter is more likely to be moved by the enthusiasm of a neighbor or relative than by anything said on “Meet the Press” by Colin Powell or in the Denver Catholic Register by Archbishop Chaput. Which leads us to the really big news of the weekend: Not only did Obama raise more money in one month than any candidate in history, his campaign has received donations from more than three million people. And, you can bet that someone who has opened his or her wallet is not going to be shy about telling friends and relatives how they are voting and why.

Winning Powell’s endorsement gave Obama a good news cycle, putting McCain on the defensive. Powell’s message was also remarkably on point, calling Obama “transformational” and calling out McCain for his selection of the underwhelming Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate. But, it is the local hairdresser who sent in $10. to the Obama campaign and has a half hour with each of her clients the next two weeks whose endorsement will really help Obama turn out his vote and sway the remaining undecided voters.

Michael Sean Winters

We Have Another Winner!

2008-10-19T07:59:00.001-07:00

The winner of the Blog Contest in the High School Division is Bobby Hausen os Regis High School. His post appears below. Runner-up for the High School Division was Daniel Morris, also of Regis. Both will receive free online subscriptions to America for one year. Congratulations Bobby and Daniel!

This Election Really Matters!

2008-10-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

As the 2008 election rapidly approaches, the economy continues to be the most important issue for voters. After several big wall street firms went under and the largest drop in stock prices since the Depression, other issues such a abortion, healthcare, and foreign aid have faded into the recesses of everyone's minds. America wants a leader who will be able to turn this economic crisis around and bring back the booming economy we had five years ago.
Neither candidate proposes a flawless plan to correct the economy. Both plans take actions that would encourage the selling of stocks, causing the market prices to plummet even further. Clearly this would not be a desirable approach to the situation seeing as "the selling" is the reason behind the recent depreciation. But just as investors sell out of fear and desperation, they also will buy overpriced stocks in fear that they are missing out on the bottomed out economy, as we saw on Columbus Day, causing the market to climb almost as quickly as it was falling in prior days. The future president should have a plan that capitalizes on this human element of the stock market and encourages buyers to invest.
November 4th also proves to be the most important election day in the past several decades because the next president will control the most powerful federal government to date. After the recent events including the 700 billion dollar bailout, America looks more and more like a socialist republic. Our Founding Fathers warned against the government holding too much power and specifically set up the government to ensure that the people of the United States served as a system of checks and balances to the federal government. Now the next president will inherit a government with much more power than ever before, and we must hope that he will use that power responsibly.
Bobby Hausen, Regis High School

The Al Smith Dinner Returns

2008-10-17T04:31:00.000-07:00

In 2004, the Al Smith Dinner did not invite the presidential candidates because one of them was a pro-choice Catholic. But, this year, the tradition returned: white tie and tails, the Cardinal-Archbishop of New York presiding, and both presidential candidates yucking it up. Best lines of the night were John McCain's joking that “I can’t shake the feeling that some people here are pulling for me. I am delighted to see you here tonight, Hillary” and Barack Obama's attempt to correct the record: "Contrary to rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger. I was born on Krypton and sent here by my father Jor-El to save the Planet Earth."

Make Election Day A Holiday!

2008-10-17T04:22:00.001-07:00

The Commonwealth of Virginia has seen its voter registration rolls increase by ten percent this year, the largest single-year increase in memory. And, a new report worries that the state may not be ready to handle all these newcomers on election. Recent reports about fraudulent registrations only make the picture more confusing and alarming.

It is difficult to be too histrionic about the importance of getting elections right: They are the basis of our entire democracy. So, worry about having enough voting machines, voter fraud, and the like are important worries. At a time when all levels of government are tightening their belts, it is important not to skimp on the budget for a sufficient number of voting machines and staff to process the expected large turnout.

There is one reform that we should enact that costs nothing. Election Day should be a federal holiday. If people working two jobs see a two hour wait at the polls, they are not going to be able to vote. Students with a full course load and a part-time job don’t have time wait in the long lines we witnessed in college towns like Columbus, Ohio last year. Making the day a holiday would make it easier for these historically under-represented voters to exercise their most basic right of citizenship.

In the small town where I grew up, voter fraud was never much of a problem. Everyone knew everyone else although in my case that was doubly true because my mother was the registrar of voters and, before her, my grandmother was the registrar of voters. But, in large, expanding precincts, it is difficult to know who might be trying to commit voter fraud. Whoever is elected on November 4, should make sure that some money is set aside to help protect the integrity of the franchise.

Elections matter and as we saw in Florida in 2000, we need to plan ahead because every vote really does count.

Michael Sean Winters

Another Winner!

2008-10-16T16:09:00.000-07:00

This submission came in past the midnight deadline but it was so good, we had to publish. It comes from Harry Johnson who is a student at Boston College and you can find it immediately below.

Abortion, Obama & The Debate

2008-10-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

In between economic promises to Joe Plumber (or was it Joe Six-Pack?) at last night's presidential debate, Barack Obama uttered words that, four years ago, would have never left the lips of Sen. John Kerry. While defending the constitutionality of Roe, the junior Senator from Illinois pledged to reduce abortions through sex education, increased access to adoption, and improved health care. He did not repeat the language that has plagued Democrats since the days of JFK, namely, that his personal opposition to abortion should have no bearing on the right to privacy.
What perked my ears, however, was Obama's assertion of the sacredness of sexuality. Sen. Obama's statement of this very Catholic truth stood out even more given the rather lackadaisical answer of Sen. McCain. McCain did little to address the moral aspect of abortion, saying that he opposed Roe v. Wade (a decision made when Obama wasn't even in college) and that Abortion should be decided by the states. Apart from repeated statements essentially saying, "Vote for me, I'm pro-life," McCain failed to make any coherent moral argument against abortion. It also didn't help that the Arizona senator scoffed at the notion of women's health. While it may be true that this phrase is often over-applied, it will not play well to mock the idea of protecting a woman's health. Indeed, as soon as McCain sneered at the phrase, the lines on CNN measuring undecided voters trended steeply downward. In contrast, Obama's claim about the sacredness of sexuality sent the meters through the roof. It was a well-crafted answer (likely created with the assistance of professor Doug Kmiec), and it was music to the ears of this young liberal Catholic.
I had the honor of serving as co-president of my public university's Catholic ministry last year. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and affirmed my hope in the future of this church. In between a multitude of Sunday masses, meatless dinners, and movie nights, I'd like to think that that I developed a sense of appreciation for my friends' moral and political beliefs. It's safe to say that, while the Catholic students at my school consider abortion to be an urgent moral issue, it is by no means the sole issue on which they will base their vote next month. They will look at the whole spectrum of the candidates' positions, including abortion, the environment, foreign policy, and the economy (stupid).
Obama's answer to the abortion question will in all likelihood not sway those who will base their vote primarily on the issue of abortion. However, I believe his answer will qualm the fears of many voters who would like to vote for the Land of Lincolner in spite of his views on abortion. Especially in the midst of the current financial crisis, it's safe to say that most Catholics will be voting with their pocketbooks and look for the candidate who offers the best hope for recovery in this time of turmoil. Nonetheless, Barack Obama's nuanced answer on abortion should provide hope to Catholic Democrats seeking a candidate with more nuanced views on abortion than in previous election cycles.

Harry Johnson

We Have A Winner!

2008-10-16T06:35:00.000-07:00

The winner of the America Election Blog Contest for college students is Alex Pazuchanics, from George Washington University. His first blog post is below. Congratulations Alex!

Thrown Under the Bus: Transit & the Election

2008-10-16T06:30:00.000-07:00

Multiple issues should be taken into consideration when preparing to vote, particularly for Catholic Americans. Just because many issues, especially public transportation, do not get much coverage in the press does not mean that it is not a significant issue that requires careful examination.
Many Americans rely on buses, light rail, and subways as their only means of transportation. It is the way they get to their jobs, their houses of worship, and their medical treatments. For these Americans, and for us all, access to transportation is a basic human necessity. If people who rely on mass transit cannot get to jobs, it hinders their ability to provide for themselves and their families.
The fact that the riders of mass transit are disproportionately working class Americans and low-income earners adds another dimension to this crucial issue. Roman Catholics have an obligation to advocate a preferential option for those who are poor. Therefore, supporting public transit as a viable alternative to automobiles promotes a form of economic justice.
To some extent, mass transit is also an issue of environmental stewardship. Making public transit a viable alternative to automobiles means reducing the total number of cars on the road generally, and the intense concentrated emissions produced during rush hour traffic, specifically. Utilizing mass transit, then is an environmentally conscious action.
Finally, mass transportation is a means of building solidarity. Riding it is an action by which people engage their neighborhood and their neighbors. Those who choose to ride the bus are supporting the well-being of those who cannot choose. Mass transit, then, serves as a public space from which a more united population develops.
Neither candidate has been particularly vocal on the issue of mass transit. As a candidate trying to transcend "issue" politics, Barack Obama is hesitant to be publicly vocal about issues affecting urban life, which to many voters still conjure up images of big city bosses and political machines. Still, the Obama campaign has released a white paper on what it plans to do with America's transportation system, which can be found here. The plan is very ambitious, and covers a wide range of transportation-related issues. It's very possible that if Obama gets elected, the current economic crisis would hamper his ability to invest in public transportation. However, infrastructure spending has historically been a feature of countercyclical deficit spending of the type espoused by FDR's brain trust. Thus, a Democratic congress may indeed increase spending on transit projects.
As a matter of comparison, the Brookings Institution released a chart comparing Obama's policies to McCain's in regards to transportation, which can be found here. The McCain campaign has been largely silent on the issue of mass transit, but given McCain's statements about cutting out "pork-barrel" programs (which mass transit is often referred to as by its detractors), it would not be presumptuous to say that McCain would be likely be support of reductions in federal funding for mass transit.
A system of public transportation is a moral issue that should be a voting issue, especially because many income-poor and working class citizens depend on it for their livelihood.
Alex Pazuchanics

Debate Re-Cap: No Change

2008-10-16T04:23:00.000-07:00

When it came time to promote new generals, Napoleon would consult with his military aides. They would brief the emperor on the education and experience of those seeking elevation in the ranks. “Yes, yes,” Napoleon would reply, “But is he lucky?”

Barack Obama is lucky. His opponent John McCain gave his best performance in any of their three debates, and it wasn’t even the headline in this morning’s Washington Post. “Stocks Sink as Gloom Seizes Wall St.” read the banner headline at the top of the page. Below it, in letters several font sizes smaller: “A Hard-Hitting Final Round.”

To make matters worse, McCain’s best performance came after most people had already made up their minds, which changes the whole nature of debate-watching. Many formerly undecided voters were not making discriminating judgments about the candidates: They were rooting for their candidate. In the immediate post debate poll conducted by CNN, 58% of viewers said Obama won to a mere 31% who thought McCain had won. CBS polled only uncommitted voters, and they scored the debate for Obama by a margin of 52% to 22% for McCain and 25% scoring it a tie.

Obama was flat for the first thirty minutes of the debate, put on the defensive by McCain on the subject of taxes, an issue with surprising resonance for independent, undecided voters. Their discussion of the economy showed the differences in their plans and the differences in their temperaments, and it should have been an opportunity for Obama to hit a home run. He did not.

McCain chief problem was not his answers but his facial expressions, especially his forced smile. As Eve Fairbanks observed at TNR, his smile “makes him look like a pleased kid who managed to recite the right lines to the teacher, even though he didn't know what they meant – ‘Look, Mom, I did good!’” At other times, he seemed barely able to contain his disgust at being forced to compete with a first-term Senator whom he clearly has come to disdain. That happens in a campaign: Because the contest is a zero-sum game, and the choice is a binary one, it takes a great deal of moral awareness to keep from falling into a Manichean view of your opponent. Your opponent and his or her campaign stand in the way of your candidate’s dreams, for the nation and for themselves. The opponent is easily demonized.

Unless, of course, you are Barack Obama who seems incapable of demonizing anybody. His performance appeared flat to me and many other commentators, but others saw a calm presence in the middle of the twin storms of the last month of the campaign and the first month of an economic crisis. If people were looking for a candidate who would become a reassuring presence in the White House, their choice was easy.

So, the debates are done. The polls are likely to tighten as the undecided voters return to their usual voting patterns. Most of those who voted for Bush in 2004 but are undecided today will end up voting for McCain and Kerry’s supporters who haven’t made up their minds will break for Obama. But, the trend lines in the state polls are all with Obama. The wind is at his back. Napoleon would promote him.

Michael Sean Winters

Education: The Issue That Should, But Won't, Get Discussed

2008-10-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

We can keep our fingers crossed that tonight's debate might touch on education issues, which are among the most important the new president will face. Our friends at Mirror of Justice have an important blog post on the subject by Greg Sisk that you can find here.
Michael Sean Winters

Humor & The Campaigns

2008-10-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

Here is the newest funny viral video: a MoveOn.com parody of a don't do drugs-type ad with young celebrities advising their friends about dealing with parents who want to vote McCain.

One of the most interesting parts of the 2008 campaign has been the use of viral videos to draw attention and sway opinion. The phenomenon was not new to the 2008 campaign, but it definitely rose to a whole new level with "Yes We Can", which had millions of hits and seemed to capture, especially for a younger, web-savvy generation, the idealistic appeal of Obama. It's probably this video as much as his rallies that also led both Sen. Hillary Clinton and later Republicans to attack Obama as messianic and also rhetorically gifted without beng concrete. As always, the playbook is, take a guy's strengths and show they are weaknesses.

There have been great virals since then; just to name a few -- the Democratic Primary in 8 Minutes, 15 Seconds (a parody of an ad for the TV show "Lost"); the Mike Huckabee/Chuck Norris video, after which his campaign suddenly took off; Paris Hilton's Response to John McCain; Les Misbarack, which set a song from Les Miserables in the Obama campaign office; comedienne Sarah Silverman's foul-mouthed but funny "The Great Schlep", in which she calls on young Jews to go to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote Obama; Tina Fay's take on Sarah Palin; and most recently, the young adult video above.

All these videos have two things in common -- they're funny; and they're all videos for the Obama campaign. As far as I have found, the closest McCain supporters have come to something similar is a variety of videos depicting Obama as a budding Stalinist leader to the song "All Hail the Messiah, Obama Obama", such as this one. Ironically, the song alone is so absurdly wonderful, in some versions it's not clear that it's not Obama supporters who have made it as a joke, rather than McCain backers who mean it as an attack.

With its celebrities waxing poetic and looking oh-so-serious the "Yes We Can" video is prime for parody, actually; but ironically, the only major alternate versions (John.He.Is and No You Can't) have come from Democrats taking aim at McCain.

Really, the only time the Republican Party has hit the funny bone in the last two months intentionally was at the convention. Sarah Palin's comment about lipstick won her big points, and only reinforces the importance of humor on the campaign trail.

To me, it suggests a new playbook is in order. Don't waste your time and money taking down your opponent, especially if there's nothing really there. Rather, get a video camera and a clever script and say something funny.

Jim McDermott, SJ

Both Candidates Float Bad Ideas

2008-10-15T04:18:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama and John McCain both unveiled plans to deal with the economic crisis this week. Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, both plans had less to do with fixing the economy and more to do with winning the election.

Obama proposed several distinct ideas in his plan and most of them were unobjectionable. He wants to give a tax credit to companies that hire new workers, the kind of incentive our tax code should always have contained. He proposed a three month moratorium on home foreclosures, to allow families a little more time to try and find a way to keep their homes. And, the best part of his proposal, if the least popular, is to give states and cities more revenue sharing so that they do not have to cut back on infrastructure projects. This makes mayors and governors happy but to the electorate at large it appears like a government funding shell game, so Obama gets credit for proposing a policy with no real political value but a great deal of economic value.

But one of his ideas is a real clunker. Obama proposes that people be allowed to remove a percentage of their 401(k)s and IRAs up to $10,000. without facing any penalties. This does, as he claims, provide a little flexibility. But, why would you propose anything that would encourage people to sell stocks? Inviting millions of Americans to enter a slumping stock market with the intent to sell will only exert more deflationary pressure on the stock market. Not only does this hurt the market as a whole, but the rest of the individual’s retirement account would be harmed as well. This is Ben & Jerry’s economics: It tastes great but it is not good for your health. Americans need to save more and spend less and any policy that encourages the opposite should be viewed with suspicion.

This proposal is especially disheartening because one of Obama’s biggest applause lines has been that he will not lie to the American people, that he will tell us what we need to hear not only what we want to hear. Indeed, in the very speech in which he outlined his new proposals he ventured as far as a candidate dare in recognizing that the spending patterns on Main Street were not much better than those on Wall Street. “Part of the reason this crisis occurred is that everyone was living beyond their means – from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street,” Obama said. “CEOs got greedy. Politicians spent money they didn’t have. Lenders tricked people into buying home they couldn’t afford and some folks knew they couldn’t afford them and bought them anyway.”

Not to be outdone, John McCain has argued for a reduction in the capital gains tax cut. But, you only register a capital gain when you sell your stock, so this is also a proposal that encourages people to do the single worse thing they can do to stabilize the markets. Additionally, there is a Never-Neverland quality to McCain’s suggestion: in 2008, it doesn’t appear that very many people will have a capital gain to be taxed in the first place. On the other hand, McCain’s proposal to stop taxing unemployment benefits only makes sense. Why should the government track a payment out and a payment in?

I suppose it is ridiculous to expect more than common pandering in the final weeks of a campaign. Still, it is disheartening especially from these two men who promised better.

Michael Sean Winters

Two Days Left for Blog Contest!

2008-10-14T05:18:00.001-07:00

Just a reminder that the deadline for submissions to our blog contest is midnight tomorrow.

McCarthyism 2.0

2008-10-14T04:24:00.000-07:00

In 1952, my mother was a student teacher at the Horace Porter Elementary School in Columbia, Connecticut. She was teaching the children about the Soviet Union. One of her students unhelpfully went home and told her parents my mother was teaching communism. Within 48 hours, she was hauled in front of the president of her college for a dismissal proceeding. Fortunately, a World War II veteran was in the classroom with my mother and was able to assure the president of the college that my mother was teaching about communism, not advocating for it.

McCarthyism cast its most full and most pernicious shadow upon America in the 1950s. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy made a career out of smearing honorable Americans by accusing them of communist sympathies. His targets included Gen. George Marshall, whom Harry Truman called “the greatest living American.” But, in the 1950s, with the Red Army in control of more than half of Europe, the 1949 fall of China to the communist forces of Mao-Zedong, and the Korean War, Americans were afraid. McCarthy stoked the fear to beat political opponents, questioning not their strategy for combating communism but implying they were unpatriotic traitors. Many otherwise decent Americans had their reputations trashed before McCarthy was censured by his fellow senators and his name became synonymous with witch-hunter.

In 1988, Lee Atwater, the chief political strategist for George H. W. Bush, introduced America to Willie Horton. A convicted criminal who was let out on a weekend furlough for good behavior in prison, Horton went on a criminal rampage, kidnapping a family and raping a woman. This happened on the watch of Gov. Mike Dukakis, Bush’s opponent in that election. It did not matter that the federal government and most states had nearly identical programs: The image of a black man raping a white woman was searing and helped erase Dukakis’s lead in the polls.

The Willie Horton ad was slimy. In the late 1990s, before he died prematurely from brain cancer, Atwater apologized to the American people for introducing racial hatred into politics in such a grotesque way. Still, Hortonism was not McCarthyism. Atwater questioned liberal attitudes towards crime, he did not question Dukakis’s patriotism.

In recent weeks, many were expecting the McCain campaign to unleash a Horton-style attack ad, something that would stoke racial fears and try to frighten white voters into voting against Obama. But, they did something worse. Since 9/11, terrorism has replaced communism as the external threat that most frightens Americans. When you say someone “pals around with terrorists” and you refer to Obama using his middle name “Hussein,” you are looking for a response in the electorate. Last week, a woman stood up at a McCain rally and said Obama was an Arab. McCain took the microphone and corrected the woman. But that woman had drawn the precise conclusion McCain’s campaign wanted her to draw: Obama is dangerous, he is not one of us, he is unpatriotic.

McCain is visibly uncomfortable in such situations. He knows that Obama is not dangerous and finally said so last Friday to another rally participant whose fears were extravagant. If Obama were that dangerous, if he really did “pal around with terrorists” it would be a matter for the Justice Department to investigate. McCain’s campaign, and its despicable allies in the media, was engaged in McCarthyism the past two weeks. It was, in the strictest sense of the word, a shame. The irony is that such gutter politics has not diminished Obama’s poll numbers one iota, it has only diminished McCain’s standing before history. The election is three weeks from today. McCain may not be able to win the election, but he can salvage his reputation.

People invoke the phrase "beneath contempt" far too casually. You need to save it for circumstances like this. Trafficking in the new McCarthyism, like trafficking in the old McCarthyism, is beneath contempt.

Michael Sean Winters

Happy Columbus Day!

2008-10-13T04:46:00.001-07:00

No posts today in honor of the holiday but we will be back tomorrow!

The Marriage of Monkeys

2008-10-10T16:17:00.000-07:00

This morning we attended the 9:30 Mass at a parish in another part of the state. The music was heartfelt, and the community warm and welcoming. It was a lovely morning, but the weather would soon become irrelevant. During the homily, the priest interpreted the reading from Ezekiel 33(". . . if you warn the wicked, trying to turn him from his way, and he refuses to turn from his way, he shall die for his guilt, but you shall save yourself") as a call to vote for Proposition 8 on California's November ballot. (For those unfamiliar with California politics, Prop 8 would establish a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.)

Aside from the intrusion of state legislative issues in the Mass, the introduction of voting instructions made us uneasy. As the Catholic parents of a daughter who is a lesbian, my husband and I are quite sensitized to this issue. We have struggled, and still struggle, to reconcile the teachings of our faith with the reality of our daughter's sexual orientation. So imagine our dismay when the homilist jokingly compared a union into which our daughter might one day enter to a "marriage of monkeys". He'd apparently seen a funny photo of monkeys dressed up in wedding finery, and felt that the prospect of gays marrying was just as ludicrous. The congregation was encouraged to have a laugh at the "monkeys'" expense.

What if there were certain teenagers in that congregation, wrestling with the difficult internal realization of a homosexual orientation, hearing those words? For these young people, the journey of self-discovery can turn to self-doubt and then to self-loathing. Our daughter believed throughout her high school years, mainly as a result of a Catholic youth group in which we insisted she participate, that she was broken, that God had made a mistake when forming her, and that she was actually unloved and unforgiven by her Creator and her Church. We were unaware of her lesbianism until she went away to college and came home for the first time. Over the years, as she has revealed the pain she lived through as she privately came to terms with who she was, we have felt that we let her down: first, by not recognizing her suffering, and second, by what we had inadvertently put her through at the well-meaning hands of church volunteers.

This was all brought home to us again by the bitter irony of today's Mass: the juxtaposition of the priest's dismissive and insensitive words, followed closely by the prayer of intercession that asked for something along the lines of those seeking a spiritual home to find one in this community. I wanted to ask, You mean, unless they are gay? Because if I were gay, I sure wouldn't be feeling very welcome in this community right about now.

Then we sang an offertory song about us being the eyes and hands of God. Can we really be that, and continue to denigrate our gay brothers and sisters? Do we participate in Christ's promise of the kingdom of heaven here and now when we bury our gay children in a secret hell? My husband and I were reminded of the time we went to Mass, shortly after our daughter had come out, and were asked to join in the seemingly untruthful song, "All are Welcome in this Place". It was a song I could not sing, because I was crying instead. Our daughter certainly feels no welcome in this place. We try to reassure her that she is always welcome in the Catholic Church, and that she stands always in the presence of a loving God, but homilies like this one discourage us.

We understand that the priest meant no personal hurt to us, that he was but following the party line of the Catholic bishops, but we still felt the more flippant of his words deserved a response. My husband wisely steered me away from confronting the priest on his own front steps in the heat of my incense. Instead, we wrote a letter to the priest. We also wrote to the pastor, so that he might be aware of what homilies were being preached in his parish. The marriage of monkeys is hardly a loving way to classify the sons and daughters of some fellow worshippers, and indeed, some of those worshippers themselves.

My husband and I have come to believe that, in the context of the state of California, Proposition 8 is a civil rights issue, rather than a sacramental issue, and thus is unjustly supported by the bishops. Which is our own attempt to live out Ezekiel's call to right an institutional wrong. As uncomfortable as we are in this position - alienating old friends and voting against pastoral guidelines - we believe that the Church needs its dissenters, as unlikely as they may be. We are not by nature confrontational people: we rarely even argue with each other. It is another divine irony that we are dissenters at all: we who have long been a couple who practiced Natural Family Planning because it was Church teaching, who supported every Church ministry and encyclical and fundraiser, who went to Mass faithfully every Sunday and brought up our daughters in the arms of Mother Church. People used to think we were really good Catholics. And we liked it that way. We liked being pillars of the community much more than we like being crazy voices in the wilderness.

But here we are, protesting, questioning, being accused of blasphemy and of malformed consciences. Here we are, defending the marriages of those considered monkeys. Here we are, timid and miserable, but witnessing in one small way to a God who is love.

Valerie Schultz

Live from Boston College!

2008-10-10T01:25:00.001-07:00

Last night, I was part of a panel sponsored by the Boisi Center here at Boston College to discuss the Catholic vote in the 2008 election. Our host was Alan Wolfe who is America’s leading non-Catholic expert on Catholicism. My co-panelist was Amy Sullivan (see her latest column in Time magazine here) who has been writing intelligently about the intersection of politics and religion for years. Not sure how I got on the stage but I was delighted to do so.

But, the stars of the night were the students. Undergraduates always ask the best questions, the most honest questions and the most important questions. They wanted to know about the history of Catholic involvement in the New Deal. They wondered how a party that has made militarism the centerpiece of its foreign policy can so blithely invoke the “culture of life” about which Pope John Paul II spoke so powerfully but also so comprehensively, not limiting the phrase to abortion but condemning as well the de-humanizing aspects of contemporary capitalism. They wondered if the Democrats will live up to their promise to reduce the abortion rate.

No one asked any questions that suggested they were buying the slimy gutter politics of character assassination being peddled by the McCain camp. No one confused an Obama victory with the eschaton either: the Senator from Illinois may be a breathe of fresh air and if he wins his election will mark a happy end to an ugly chapter in America’s race relations, but it will not bring an end to injustice. The students wondered how the political generation of their parents had so long worshipped at the pagan altar of the free market.

The only really ridiculous question came from an older woman who wanted us to comment on how Obama “stole” the nomination from Hillary Clinton. I had heard that there were former Hillary supporters who just could not bring themselves to accept her loss, but I had never met one. It was a bit of a thrill, like going to the zoo and seeing the Giant Pandas. Alan and Amy jumped in to answer the question, making sure my Irish temper did not get the better of me.

The most important impression I had was the readiness of this young generation of scholars to take active roles in the direction of both their country and their Church. They want to get involved. They want their Catholicism to be alive and enlivening. They clearly see the Church as a protagonist in the culture, a source of enlightenment and intellectual ballast in a sometimes stormy intellectual climate. They see what a mess the country is in, from the crashing Dow to the on-going fiasco in Iraq, but they have not given up hope that our politics can do better and that starting November 5, it will.

Michael Sean Winters

McCain's Temperament is Uncertain

2008-10-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

I shared an elevator ride once with John McCain.

We were on the South side of the Capitol, off the Senate floor. In between us was a gorgeous young Senate aide, no more than 30 years old with a statuesque figure and hair down to her shoulders. (Joe Klein in Primary Colors had a memorable if demeaning name for such young women – muffins.) After stepping in to the elevator at the last moment, McCain shot a quick look in the woman’s direction, flashed a half smile, and said hello to her briefly. He did not acknowledge me. I got the impression that, like me, he would have liked to have done more than give her a tributary glance and salutation. Before exiting, he kept his head down at a 45 degree angle, his jaw clenched slightly.

That was eight or nine years ago. As any political observer will tell you, McCain’s temperament continues to be an issue. During the debate Tuesday night, Barack Obama raised it in response to McCain’s charge that Obama’s inexperience on foreign affairs would be dangerous, noting that McCain had sang "bomb, bomb, Iran" and threatned North Korea with extinction. This week, Obama’s campaign has run television ads describing McCain’s political leadership as “erratic.”

Are Obama’s attacks on McCain’s character fair? To answer the question, it helps to define what I mean by temperament. I am using the Catechism’s definition of the term:

Temperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It ensures the will's mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable. The temperate person directs the sensitive appetites toward what is good and maintains a healthy discretion: "Do not follow your inclination and strength, walking according to the desires of your heart."⁷² Temperance is often praised in the Old Testament: "Do not follow your base desires, but restrain your appetites."⁷³ In the New Testament it is called "moderation" or "sobriety." We ought "to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world."⁷⁴

By his own admission, McCain has fallen short of this standard. According to The Washington Post, he received a marriage license with his current wife, Cindy, four weeks before his divorce from his first wife was final. According to his 2002 autobiography Worth The Fighting For, McCain blamed his marriage’s demise not on his time in Vietnam but rather his “immaturity and selfishness.”As late as the 1990s, McCain was legendary on Capitol Hill for screaming at any political figures, including senators, who disrespected him. For this latter reason, Republican Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi told a Boston Globe reporter that “the thought of a McCain presidency sends a cold chill down my spine.”

My impression, perhaps biased, is that McCain recognizes his intemperance and has sought to discipline it. He called his divorce from his first wife “the greatest moral failing of my life.” If the Post is to be believed, he has made amends with at least some of those whom he cursed out. He has passed major laws, such as campaign finance reform and the tobacco settlement, by working with liberal Democrats.

Yet McCain’s mastery over his instincts and desires is uncertain at times. At one point Tuesday night, McCain famously referred to Obama not as a senate colleague or as his presidential rival but as “that one.” That a 72-year-old presidential nominee made such a remark is not only humorous, but also somewhat embarrassing.

If McCain is elected president, my fear is not that he would lead us to an impulsive war; McCain’s temperament is probably somewhat less than that of Joe Biden, a shoot-from-the hip type of guy but hardly a reckless figure. My fear is that he would scuttle deals, with foreign governments or Congress, out of personal pique.

Forgive me for getting on my moral high horse, but that’s not what the country, especially at this moment in history, needs. It needs the first-class temperament of Obama or the temperament that McCain has at times shown.

Mark Stricherz

Check This Out!

2008-10-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog will by now be familiar with Rick Garnett's writing. Always smart, always well written, Garnett's posts have exhibited the conservative side of the political equation with unequalled intelligence and insight (even though he and I disagree ALL THE TIME! LOL!).
Rick's main blogging home is at Mirror of Justice where you will find a series of recent entries on the economic meltdown that are well worth reading.
Michael Sean Winters

Blog Post Contest Deadline Extended

2008-10-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it, we have extended the deadline for our blog post contest until next Wednesday, October 15. Please submit all entries by midnight. Click on the link for more details.

How the Economic Crisis Will Affect the Cabinet

2008-10-08T22:54:00.000-07:00

The economic crisis has changed many calculations. Certainly, if Barack Obama wins his most important choice may be his new Secretary of the Treasury, a job that became vastly more influential with the passage of the Bailout last week. But if history is any guide, another Cabinet post may prove just as critical in an Obama administration: The Secretary of Labor.

In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the reins of governmental authority. The four most important Cabinet posts went to men largely forgotten by history. Treasury Secretary William Woodin helped establish the FDIC to ensure bank deposits, and the FDIC is still a major stabilizer in the current crisis, but he resigned due to ill health after one year. Cordell Hull was a largely successful Secretary of State who served until 1945. Almost no one remembers FDR’s Secretary of War George Dern or his Attorney General Homer Cummings. But, his Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, stayed with FDR throughout his tenure and left the most indelible marks on his administration.

When FDR asked Perkins to take the job, she agreed to do so only after the incoming President promised to pursue a progressive agenda: limiting the work week, unemployment insurance, Social Security. FDR agreed to these, although he told Perkins that she would have to build up public support for Social Security before he would present it to the Congress. To help her in this task, Perkins enlisted the support of Msgr. John A. Ryan of the Catholic Bishops Conference and the two were so effective that Social Security was established within two years and Catholics became linked to the New Deal political coalition for more than a generation.

The challenge facing the next president is deeper than resolving the credit crunch though, mercifully, not as challenging as the crisis FDR faced. Over the past several decades, the structure of the economy has become top-heavy: CEOs make millions, even when they are fired, while the wages of average workers are stagnant or falling. Fancy financial instruments have diverted money that should go into infrastructure improvements. Money sent abroad to pay for oil should be used to convert the auto industry into a 21st century manufacturer of non-gas guzzling cars. The free market system is in desperate need of a legal structure that rewards work over speculation, smart investments in manufacturing over risky investments in derivatives.

If Barack Obama wins in November, he would be well advised to turn, like FDR, to a woman to lead the Labor Department and there is one woman who could fit the bill perfectly: California Congresswoman Linda Sanchez. She is not only a friend of organized labor, her tenure on both the Education and Labor Committee and the Judiciary Committee have made her an expert on the ways that the law can influence the labor market and the educational system that feeds the labor market. If that were not enough, her service on the Foreign Affairs Committee provides her with a wealth of expertise and contacts to address trade issues that will be at the heart of government’s restructuring of the rules of the road for the economic future.

Political appointments such as Cabinet positions usually go to those with a special expertise or strong political ties to the President. Sanchez endorsed Barack Obama this year and trudged through the snows of Latino communities in Connecticut stumping for him. Connecticut was the only Northeast state to go for Obama on Super Tuesday. There was a personal cost to her endorsement: Sanchez’s older sister, Loretta, who is also a California congresswoman, endorsed Hillary Clinton. So, Sanchez has both the expertise for the job and a demonstrated political to Obama.

There is less than a month to go in the election. We can bet that the month will be largely spent discussing foolishness: Obama’s sitting on a board with William Ayers, McCain and his wife owning many houses, Sarah Palin’s latest gaffe. The nation would be better served if the candidates were asked to name some of the people they would want in their Cabinet. And, Obama would be smart to put Linda Sanchez at the top of his list. A bold choice worked for FDR and it could work for Obama too.

Michael Sean Winters
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Obama's Moral Fortitude is Questionable

2008-10-08T15:18:00.000-07:00

Does Barack Obama’s association with William Ayers (see here and here) matter?

In the liberal blogosphere, the question is dismissed out of hand, viewed as nothing more than a partisan attack. In the conservative blogosphere, the question is debated intensely, pitting those who those who believe it exposes Obama’s liberal ideology against those who believe that ordinary voters don’t (and therefore shouldn't) care about the issue.

It’s a tough question. On the one hand, powerful people have many friends; to take one example, does Mother Teresa deserve calumny for having been flown to Haiti and meeting Papa Doc Duvalier? On the other hand, the company a powerful figure keeps reveals something about his or her character; surely Mother Teresa regretted accepting the Haitian dictator’s hospitality.

So who better to provide a good answer than Dick Morris (!), the legendary and slightly infamous political consultant. Morris cast Obama’s ties to Ayers in a broader context:

So let’s sum up Obama’s Chicago connections. His chief financial supporter was Tony Rezko, now on his way to federal prison. His spiritual adviser and mentor was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of “God damn America” fame. And the guy who got him his only administrative job and put him in charge of doling out $50 million is William Ayers, a terrorist who was a domestic Osama bin Laden in his youth …

Why did Obama put up with Ayers? Because he got a big job and $50 million of patronage to distribute to his friends and supporters in Chicago. Why did he hang out with Jeremiah Wright? Because he was new in town, having grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia and having been educated at Columbia and Harvard, and needed all the local introductions he could get to jump-start his political career. Why was he so close to Rezko?

Morris here isn’t attacking Obama’s ideology as much as he is his character. He’s suggesting that Obama lacks moral fortitude. As fortitude is a key point in this post, it is useful to read the Catechism’s definition of this cardinal virtue:

Fortitude is the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life. The virtue of fortitude enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions. It disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause. "The Lord is my strength and my song."⁷⁰ "In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."⁷¹

Fortitude should be distinguished from perseverance or endurance. Nobody can doubt that Obama lacks those qualities, especially as he is the first African American to win a major party’s presidential nomination. Yet does Obama really possess constancy in the pursuit of the good?

I have my doubts. If he did, he would have stopped associating with an unrepentant domestic terrorist and a shady financier; to his credit, he has cut ties with Wright. Of course, Obama’s knowledge about his friends is unclear. But certainly, he knew Ayers better than he has let on.

It is tempting to think that Obama’s questionable moral fortitude is largely irrelevant. This would be a mistake. High-level politicians deal with interest groups and lobbyists every day; whether they stand up or give in to them matters.

Take the issue of abortion. For all of the talk about Obama’s interest in reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, he has not stood up to the abortion industry a single time; he always gives in to their requests and demands. Obama’s lack of moral courage was most evident in his votes, as an Illinois state senator, against the born-alive infant protection act. As Steven Waldman, the pro-choice founder of Beliefnet, wrote of Obama’s record on this issue,

The episode does show him to be a down-the-line pro-choice legislator. In fact, the charge that Obama is the most pro-choice candidate in years may well be true (though the other Democrats were pretty pro-choice too). When I read through the legislative history, I came to believe that Obama's general impulse was: when it doubt, side with NARAL. If you're ardently pro-life, you are absolutely justified in being scared of Obama for that reason alone, without having cast him as a serial killer.

When in doubt, side with NARAL: that impulse shows as much moral fortitude as always siding with the neighborhood bully or far worse.

Mark Stricherz

The Second Debate

2008-10-08T04:53:00.001-07:00

Last night’s “town hall” debate was not exactly newsworthy. John McCain announced a proposal to buy up all bad mortgages in the country as a further step towards solving the economic crisis, an idea that was quickly condemned by his own base. Barack Obama suggested that despite the cost of his health care plan, and the lack of funds after the Bailout, we needed to proceed more than ever with universal health insurance, nibbling at the enormity of the economic crisis without explicitly addressing it. Neither candidate demonstrated much in the way of macroeconomic savoir faire.

I am fascinated by the emotion-meters that CNN gives to undecided voters which allow them to register instantly whether they approve or disapprove of what a candidate is saying. The most consistent result is that whenever either candidate went on the attack, the meters crashed. Voters do not want their politicians taking potshots at each other when the nation faces serious difficulties. Only once did an attack get a positive response, and it was a counter-attack. After being criticized very condescendingly by McCain for not “understanding” foreign policy, Obama shot back with a sharp criticism of the decision to go to war in Iraq in the first place, questioning McCain’s judgment. The emoto-meters stayed high, especially among women.

The economic crisis is so large and the proposals offered last night seemed so small. McCain talked about nuclear power three times, but it is difficult to see how that is the key to the crisis. Obama gave a thorough and smoothly delivered critique of the trickle-down theories that have guided the GOP since Ronald Reagan and which have left the country chronically insolvent. Neither delivered on the empathy front.

Neither did either candidate deliver a knockout debate punch. There was a real opportunity to do so. One woman asked what I believe was the best question ever asked by anybody in a debate forum: “Is health care a commodity?” McCain could have explained that the best way to allocate goods and services remains the market. Obama could have hit a home run in recognizing that health care is about security and, as we saw Franklin Roosevelt assert is yesterday’s post, security is a spiritual value. That question was the opening for either candidate to discuss what really must occur in the next four years, a renegotiation of the social contract akin to what FDR accomplished in his first term.

Was there a winner? According to a CNN poll taken immediately after the event, 54 percent of voters who watched the debate thought Obama had won while 30 percent thought the same of McCain. Most worryingly for the McCain campaign, 54 percent also said Obama appeared to be the stronger leader, compared to 42 percent who thought McCain appeared stronger. “Leadership” is a fuzzy concept, but insofar as McCain needs to create doubts about Obama, a majority who seem him as the stronger leader of the two shows what little traction McCain’s attacks have had. Insofar as no one “won” then Obama won because McCain is behind and needs a way to change the debate. But, neither candidate impressed and the American people want the reassurance that their next president is going to be impressive in his command of the economic crisis that has millions of Americans worried.

Michael Sean Winters

Election Blog Contest Update!

2008-10-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that America magazine is sponsoring a blog post contest - send us a blog post, and if it is one of the top three we receive, we will publish it, invite you to post again, and give you a free one year online subscription to America magazine. There are winners in both high school and college categories. Due to a scheduling conflict this weekend, the contest is being extended until next Wednesday, October 15th. E-mail your entries to blogelection@aol.com.

More Fallout From the Meltdown

2008-10-07T04:45:00.000-07:00

The moral dimension of the Wall Street meltdown took center stage yesterday, first in Rome and later in Washington.

In Rome, the Holy Father referred to the crisis in his opening remarks to the Synod of Bishops which began its deliberations yesterday. Referring to worldly things, Pope Benedict XVI said, “These seem to be true reality, but one day they will pass away. We see this now with the fall of the great banks. Money disappears, it becomes nothing. And thus all these things which seem to be real and upon which we can rely, are in fact of secondary importance. ... Only the Word of God is the foundation of all reality, stable like heaven. Therefore we must change our concept of reality. A realist is one who recognizes that the Word of God - this reality that appears so weak - is in fact the foundation of everything."

I do not think the Pope was indicting the desire to earn one’s daily bread or to provide for one’s family through the sweat of the brow. But, his observation that “money disappears, it becomes nothing” is more than a casual indictment of the world of high finance which have dominated modern, capitalist economies in recent years. Yesterday, the S&P 500 lost $384.4 billion of “nothing.” What exactly is lost when the Dow Industrials Average loses 800 points? It is the perception of the future worth of a company. A perception is lost. The Holy Father points to realities that are not just deeper, they are, well, more real.

“He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly,” the Blessed Mother proclaims in the Magnificat. In Washington yesterday, we watched one such mighty thrown from his throne, the former head of the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, Jr., testify before Congress about the collapse of his bank. He claimed to take “total responsibility” for the collapse, but was short on specifics. He could not say why, for example, in December of 2007, when he knew his bank was facing a liquidity problem, he nonetheless approved almost $5 billion in bonuses to himself and other employees. Nor could Fuld explain why he told analysts that his company was doing fine just five days before filing for bankruptcy.

What is the political consequence of all this? The desire for revenge against the titans of Wall Street is understandable and must be resisted, but the desire for justice can yet be redeemed. Either candidate or both at tonight’s debate could say that in addition to the $700 billion bailout passed last week, they will seek additional funds to prosecute any criminal wrongdoing by the likes of Mr. Fuld and to recoup any assets that can be legally garnished. The government routinely garnishes the wages of average workers when they owe back taxes or child support. Why not garnish the vacation homes of a few Wall Street executives?

Michael Sean Winters

Whither the Audacity of Hope?

2008-10-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

This weekend, the McCain campaign began trying to change the conversation from the economic mess, which has cost them dearly in the polls. They announced they were taking the gloves off and were going to go after Barack Obama’s “character.” Of course, it tells you something about the character of John McCain that he does not want to discuss the most pressing issue facing the nation. He would rather talk about William Ayers, a man who did evil deeds in the 1960s but who has been an education teacher for twenty years and who once sat on a board with Obama.

Obama had an opportunity to take the high road. “I want to lay out a vision for fixing the economy and John McCain wants to talk about something somebody else did when I was 8 years old. That is the choice facing the American electorate: someone concerned about you and someone concerned about nonsense.” The American people, especially the undecided voters, would see the glaring difference between the candidates and choose accordingly.

Instead, the Obama campaign has launched into an attack on McCain’s prior associations, specifically his involvement in the Keating Five scandal in the late 1980s. The tactic may work in terms of the election. It may not. But, what it will not do is give Obama a mandate for governance if he wins. So much for the audacity of hope.

Michael Sean Winters

The Economic Crisis: What Will Change?

2008-10-06T04:39:00.000-07:00

In the heat of an election, with its emphasis on tactical maneuvers, advertising buys, and ground operations, it is difficult to detect the broad stroke of history as she marches on. Yet march she does and in the past two weeks the economic crisis has resulted in unimaginable levels of government intervention in the nation’s financial markets. After seven years in which the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security were the most important members of the President’s Cabinet, now the Secretary of the Treasury has been vested with heretofore unknown authority over huge sums of money and the power to intervene in the business of the nation. The GOP, which has long championed deregulation, has abandoned that plank but voters remember the clarion call issued by both Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin at their convention last month for government to “get out of the way.”

Many commentators are looking at the broader ramifications of the economic meltdown. Among the best is Alan Wolfe. Writing in a recent post for The New Republic, Wolfe argued that while the political effects of the Great Depression outlasted the economic depression itself, he doubts that this will be the case today. Specifically, he notes that the anger against Wall Street in the 1930s was more organized and more ideological. Conversely, Wolfe argues that the anger at Wall Street today “is too diffuse and incoherent to help [Americans] channel it constructively.” Wolfe notes also that the fear-mongering that was used to pass the bill, and which characterizes too much of both presidential campaigns, is a bad psychological premise for real reform.

Alan Wolfe is one of the nation’s most astute political observers, so I disagree with him only when necessary. But, I think he is wrong, or better to say, half-wrong, and the half of him that is wrong is not in his diagnosis but in his prognosis. He is right that the anger of Americans today is diffuse and incoherent. And, he is right that fear-mongering played a large role in passing the Bailout. Fear is now the only thing the McCain camp has to peddle and the Obama campaign is sullying itself with similar tactics.

But, I want to believe that these words could yet define the election and, more importantly, the political consequences of the economic crisis, if Barack Obama were to give them voice: “What do the people of America want more than anything else? To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security--security for themselves and for their wives and children. Work and security--these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values, the true goal toward which our efforts of reconstruction should lead. These are the values that this program is intended to gain; these are the values we have failed to achieve by the leadership we now have.”

Or, I fancy this observation could shape the politics of the nation: “Wild radicalism has made few converts, and the greatest tribute that I can pay to my countrymen is that in these days of crushing want there persists an orderly and hopeful spirit on the part of the millions of our people who have suffered so much. To fail to offer them a new chance is not only to betray their hopes but to misunderstand their patience.”

The words are from Franklin Roosevelt’s acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic National Convention. Roosevelt was not entirely averse to stoking a bit of fear, still less of explicit partisanship, in that speech, and in his famous address to the Commonwealth Club in September, 1932. “Put plainly,” Roosevelt said in the latter speech, “we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.” But, FDR had the uncanny ability, that Wolfe cites, to give the American people a true sense of hope in a time of truly dreadful economic conditions, conditions much worse than those we face today. Barack Obama needs to reclaim his voice of hope, and of hope’s audacity, in the remaining month of the election.

Obama can coast to the finish if he wants. But, if he wants to rise to the historical moment, and not merely win an election, he should make this election, already tilting in his favor, a mandate to aggressively alter the relationship between politics and economics. The pagan gods of the free market have fallen from their pedestals. The American people look to government to restore order, morals, work, security. The want a new New Deal. Will he deliver?

Michael Sean Winters

Catholic Social Thought, Regulation, and Our Two Parties Revisited

2008-10-04T14:52:00.000-07:00

In the months after I was in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, I worked in a seafood restaurant and market in Baton Rouge, LA. The experience was not only sociologically and culturally fascinating; I learned, for example, how to boil and cook crawdads in a huge vat. It was also politically sobering. I learned that some of our cooks, all from third-world countries and all female, were essentially forced to work 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week. Their pay: $6-7 an hour. And, I was told, none of the cooks wanted to work the grueling hours.

How could this be I our manager? Easy, I was told: Under state law, businesses with fewer than x number of employees did not need to abide by federal labor laws. Small businesses no doubt had carved out an exemption for themselves. Neither Democrats nor Republicans had taken on the small-business lobby, a politically sacred cow. As a result, cooks and their families suffered. The lesson was instructive: businesses need to be regulated well; if they aren’t, people suffer.

The lesson is equally valid today. On Thursday, I wrote about the bad regulations, supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations, which led to the global financial panic. This afternoon, I will mention another bad regulation, supported by Democrats and Republicans, which caused the financial crisis.

The Securities and Exchange Commission four years ago essentially allowed large investment banks to pile up a mountain of debt without requiring that they have a tractor to get rid of it. As The New York Times tells the story, the overturning of the net-capital rule (not to be confused with the overturning of the uptick or plus-tick rule) was significant:

Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.

On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.

They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

The consequences have been terrible. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Bear Stearns was sold into a hastily arranged marriage with JP Morgan Chase; Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America; and taxpayers are on the hook for at least $29 billion.

The story seeks to pin the blame on Republicans; after all, they controlled the commission that approved the rule and failed to regulate the companies. I take the point that Republicans are more likely to let companies self regulate. Still, I think the story takes its thesis too far.

Democrats were almost as complicit in the de-regulation. Both Democrats on the SEC approved the rule change. And it was a Democrat-dominated SEC that in 1999 failed to give the SEC oversight in regulating parent companies. The Times’ story only mentions these facts only in passing.

In truth, both parties are to blame for this mess. Both embrace the theory of deregulation (Republicans more so than Democrats admittedly). And both ignore the wisdom of Catholic social teaching. As Bishop William Murphy wrote about the financial crisis on behalf of the bishops,

The scandalous search for excessive economic rewards even to the point of dangerous speculation that exacerbates the pain and losses of the more vulnerable are egregious examples of an economic ethic that places economic gain above all other values. This ignores the impact of economic decisions on the lives of real people as well as the ethical dimension of the choices we make and the moral responsibility we have for their effect on people.

It is a lesson that the good cooks of my seafood restaurant could have told you.

Mark Stricherz

Questions for the Candiates II

2008-10-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of the remaining presidential debates, the editors of America have posted an online editorial with ten sets of questions about domestic politics for consideration by the moderators and participants. The online editorial can be found here.

Matt Malone, S.J.

Politics & Baseball

2008-10-03T05:00:00.001-07:00

One of the problems for John McCain is…baseball. In the past two weeks, the economic crisis has moved undecided voters towards Barack Obama. McCain has one month to pull those voters back to undecided and then win them over. It is a tall order under any circumstance. But, it is especially difficult because in three key swing states – Florida, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire – all eyes are on baseball.

The playoffs feature the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Boston Red Sox. (In New England, the Red Sox are everybody’s team and New Hampshire relies on Boston television stations for news.) Team Obama would love to see a Tampa Bay-Boston final in the American League and the Phillies make it to the finals in the National League. In the other match-up, Obama has locked up both California and Illinois so it doesn’t matter whether the Cubs or the Dodgers win. Obama is a Cubs’ fan, so he can cheer for his team without fear of political fallout.

McCain needs a game-changer. He needs voters in suburban Philadelphia, southern New Hampshire and the I-4 corridor in Florida to give him a second look. But for many Americans, the games that will dominate the local news are being played on the baseball diamond.

Michael Sean Winters

Welcome John O'Callaghan

2008-10-03T04:12:00.000-07:00

America magazine's special Election Blog is delighted to welcome John O'Callaghan to its pages. John is a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University and his first post is below. Welcome John!

The Veep Debate

2008-10-03T04:10:00.000-07:00

The vice-presidential debate was not quite as exciting as it billing. Overall, both candidates did what they had to do, their performances confirmed what we knew about them, and the lack of any major blunders means the night will pass quickly from public consciousness.

The expectations of high drama were those that attend an execution. All this past week, Americans were treated to Gov. Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric. Palin’s performance was dreadful; some of her replies were so unintelligible, you wondered if she was speaking in tongues. The confidant, sharp, attacking woman who had mesmerized the nation with her convention speech in St. Paul disappeared, replaced but an uninformed, deer-in-the-headlight, rube. Conservative columnists were questioning whether she should step aside.

Last night, Gov. Palin stopped the bleeding. She was able to answer all the questions or, as she herself said, answer the questions she wanted to answer. I think a candidate, especially a first-time national candidate, gets points when they assert themselves against the moderator and their opponent as Palin did. Her answers tended to be a bit sophomoric: some had details, some had broad strokes, but no answer demonstrated the ability to connect the details to the overarching philosophy of the candidates.

I thought her “aw shucks” demeanor would strike a chord with middle America especially in contrast to Sen. Joe Biden’s more senatorial bearing. My debate-watching partner disagreed: He thought of the debate as an interview or a professional presentation in which homey analogies would never be used. Evidently, he was right and I was wrong. The polls immediately after the debate showed Americans scoring the debate for Biden by 51-39 percent, even though 70 percent said Biden looked like a more typical politician.

Biden did what he had to do, and what may have been very difficult for him. His job was to not make news. The Democrats have benefitted from the renewed focus on the economy in the past two weeks and they did not want any story line to take away from that focus. The big political news yesterday was the McCain campaign’s decision to pull out of Michigan and the big news today is the vote in the House of Representatives on the revised Bailout package. Those are both good story lines, with longer legs, than a good debate performance by the undercard.

Both Palin and Biden will spend much of this last month of the campaign in small towns in swing states. Both are extremely likable people who will do well. Both will be used to whip up the base as well. Palin redeemed her political career last night if not her chances at becoming vice-president. The McCain camp still needs a game-changer and it is difficult to see where or what that could be.

Michael Sean Winters

A Different Take on Kmiec's Book

2008-10-03T03:44:00.000-07:00

Michael Winters recommends reading Prof. Kmiec’s book about Obama, “Can a Catholic Support Him?” This is good advice, as we can all use more reading in our lives; what Catholic would have the temerity to reject the advice “tolle et lege.” Reading this book may help many to understand Kmiec’s support for Obama, despite the latter’s absolute support of abortion rights, and the need for the government to promote those rights through the Freedom of Choice Act which would effectively eliminate all state restrictions on abortion and bans on public funding of it.
But I think that in the present context Kmiec mistitled the book. The question isn’t whether a Catholic “can” support Obama. The Church has made it clear that a Catholic can, as She has made it clear that a Catholic can support any pro-choice candidate for office, even one with as absolute a pro-abortion position as Obama’s, so long as the support is not directed at the pro-choice position, and one has proportionate reasons for tolerating the evil of the pro-abortion position. In arguing that a Catholic “can” support Obama, Kmiec is adding nothing to what the Church has already made clear.
The question is whether a Catholic “should” support Obama. And Kmiec has for a while been deploying several arguments to convince Catholics that they “should” support Obama over McCain. Michael refers to one argument when he mentions Kmiec’s claim that both Obama and McCain are pro-choice, and neither candidate’s pro-choice position fully accords with Catholic teaching. He has made this argument before. He argues that Obama believes the “decision” about abortion is the mother’s to make, while John McCain believes the “decision” belongs with the states, rather than the federal government, to legislate on abortion; in other words McCain advocates Federalism. Kmiec then concludes that as both are “pro-choice,” differing merely on the locus of the choice, the individual or the state, neither position fully accords with Catholic teaching. “Neither candidate presents a position fully compatible with Catholic teaching recognizing abortion for the intrinsic evil that it is.” The conclusion is that the voter is confronted with an option between two pro-choice candidates.
But this argument is plainly fallacious, as it equivocates on the terms ‘decision’ and ‘choice’. Who isn’t pro-choice if being pro-choice means being in favor of choice on something or another? Everyone is “pro-choice” about whether to eat the vegetables at dinner. The Church is “pro-choice” if you are talking about the right of parents to choose the setting of their children’s education.
Decisions and choices are defined by their objects—what are they about? Obama’s position is that the decision to have an abortion is a legitimate moral choice made by an individual that must be protected from any interference by any governmental entity. The relevant choice that he is “pro” with respect to is the beginning of an act of abortion. And Kmiec understates the point when he says that Obama’s position is not “fully compatible with” Catholic teaching—it is fully incompatible with Catholic teaching. McCain’s position is that the decisions about how to legislate concerning abortion reside with the states. The relevant choice that he is “pro” with respect to is an act of a government that brings about a law, not an act that brings about an abortion. And one can maintain that certain legislative acts belong to the states without being committed to the rightness of every legislative act. So I may think that the choice to determine educational standards belongs with the states, and still think that the actual standards chosen by a state are bad. McCain’s position is entirely consistent with maintaining that the failure of states to legislate restrictions on abortion is a failure to protect the common good; Obama’s position is not. Indeed, McCain has consistently voted against pro-choice legislation and for pro-life legislation, while the reverse holds true of Obama.
Kmiec would be hard pressed to detail just where the Catholic Church teaches against Federalism; indeed the Church’s teaching on subsidiarity resonates strongly with Federalism. So it is simply false and misleading to suggest that McCain’s position is “not fully compatible with” Catholic teaching. Obama’s position is that our federal constitutional order can, does, and should exclude a class of human beings from the protection of law, while McCain’s position is that it should not. This is a difference of justice at the foundation of any social order; one position destroys the conditions necessary for the common good, while the other does not. It is difficult to imagine what proportionate reasons there are for ignoring a position that destroys the conditions necessary for the common good. Thus it is specious to suggest that both are “pro-choice” in the sense relevant to the question “should a Catholic support him?”

John O’Callaghan

Spirit of St. Louis

2008-10-02T14:45:00.000-07:00

Watching "Hardball" which is in St. Louis for the Veep debate tonight. Behind Chris Matthews, there are posters that read "Catholics for Obama." They are not handmade; they are official campaign posters. Obama understands what John Kerry didn't: Catholics are the classic swing voters and they are going to decide the election.

Bad Regulation Caused the Financial Panic (Or What Catholic Social Thought Can Teach Our Parties)

2008-10-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

Who or what caused the global financial panic? Listening to Catholic pundits, you would blame either the Republicans or the Democrats.

Over at Inside Catholic, Brian Saint-Paul approvingly quotes a 1999 New York Times story about the Clinton administration's responsibility for the crisis:

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates....

Over at In All Things, Jim McDermott, SJ faults the GOP for a laissez-faire economic philosophy:

even as the market has prospered over the last ten years, an ever-deepening outrage has been simmering beneath the surface. The idea that the government might be letting "fat cats" get away with it yet again has caused the pot finally to boil.

There is a certain paradox in all of this, as the party largely responsible for this mess was elected by a lot of those who are angry. As they say, you get what you pay for. (Unfortunately, so does the rest of the world.)

McDermott, SJ,is right to criticize the GOP for its coziness with Wall Street, and Saint-Paul is right to criticize the Clinton administration for pursuing unsound economic policies. But in truth, the two analyses tell only half the story. Partisan policies did not cause the global financial panic; unreasonable regulation did. Just read Catholic social teaching.

The Democrats’ capital sin was pride: They promoted easy credit to risky borrowers. As late as the early 1990s, qualifying for a prime home loan was difficult; you had to have not only a good credit score, but also put up tens of thousands of dollars. In the late 1990s, the regulation changed. In an effort to expand home ownership to minorities and the working class, Fannie Mae, under pressure from the Clinton administration, reduced down-payment requirements; instead of needing to put up around $20,000, a couple needed to put up far less. In addition, Fannie Mae’s policy allowed couples that made their monthly mortgage payments on time for two years to pay a regular interest rate.

The regulatory change was well-intentioned; who really opposes expanding home ownership for minorities and the working class? But the change was risky. Some would-be homeowners were bound to default on their mortgages; the attendant foreclosures were bound to harm banks and the real estate market, especially during a recession. As Steven A. Holmes, the author of that 1999 Times article, warned presciently,

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

The Republicans' capital sin was avarice: They allowed Wall Street pros to sell stocks without regard to the common good. As late as July 5, 2007, making a fast buck on the market was not automatic; if you wanted to short a stock, you could sell only when the stock’s price was higher than the previous trade. On July 6, 2007, the regulation changed. In an effort to appease Wall Street, SEC Chairman Chris Cox eliminated the uptick or plus-tick rule. Now you could sell a stock short whenever you wanted.

This regulatory change, too, was risky. The old rule had been created, by Joe Kennedy in 1934, to prevent the market from going down sharply or, as it is known on Wall Street, a bear raid. And going down sharply is what many companies’ stocks did. For example, consider the recent history of Fannie’s stock price. From the early 1990s to 2007, it rose from 12 to 70. In six months, it plunged from 70 to 2. Now you know why the government was forced to buy out Fannie Mae.

The importance of the uptick or plus-tick rule is not well known. I could not find information about it in the print MSM at all, although popular financial crazyman Jim Cramer has talked about it on his show a lot. But its significance was recognized by some. Larry Kudlow, a Catholic convert, warned presciently in August 2007, that

[i]n today’s context, is it purely a coincidence that Chris Cox’s new SEC “no uptick” rule made its debut at the same time that stock market volatility has gone gangbusters? Are hedge fund traders shorting stocks on down ticks? This could be adding huge momentum to downsized price movement. It could also be putting ordinary mom and pops investors on Main Street at great risk to the machinations of Wall Street professionals.

Maybe you want to understand the problems of Fannie Mae’s and the SEC’s regulations in detail. If so, research the issue on the Internet and avoid looking for partisan interpretations. But to those who are too busy, I advise picking up a copy of the Catechism and reading line 2425. It tells pretty much all you need to know: “Reasonable regulation of the marketplace and economic initiatives, in keeping with a just hierarchy of values and a view to the common good, is to be commended.” (2425)

Mark Stricherz

Blog Post Contest

2008-10-02T05:32:00.001-07:00

Want to have your college or grad school or job application really stand out? Get published! And, at America’s election blog, we want to publish you!

We are launching a contest for the best blog posts. Compose a blog post of 400-500 words and send it to us by October 10. There will be two categories, one for high school students and one for college students, and three winners in each category. In addition to publishing the winning posts, the winners will be invited to post through the remaining weeks of the campaign, so you can get published multiple times! If all that were not enough, winners will also receive a free, one-year, on-line subscription to America magazine!

Submissions should be emailed to us at blogelection@aol.com. Start your computers would-be bloggers!

On Kmiec's Book: "Can A Catholic Support Him?"

2008-10-02T03:35:00.000-07:00

Memo to Obama Campaign: Order 100,000 copies of Doug Kmiec’s new book “Can A Catholic Support Him?” and distribute them to the parish council members of every Catholic church in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Denver, Colorado and St. Louis, Missouri

Those who have been following this blog will know that Doug Kmiec served in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, was Dean of the Law School at Catholic University, and is a lifelong pro-life activist. They will also know that he endorsed Barack Obama this spring and was subsequently denied Communion at a Mass in California. They may have forgotten, as I did, that Kmiec had endorsed Mitt Romney before he dropped out of the race.

Many will be surprised that a law professor is capable of such easy-to-read prose. After watching a campaign protest, Kmiec laments what the nation’s political life has become: “a nation that chooses up sides readily and considers opposing viewpoints almost never. Rather than seeking ‘a more perfect union,’ we look for reasons to dislike one another. In some cases, we have been angry so long and with such intensity, the idea of finding common ground or pursuing a common good is unthinkable.” These are the words of someone who desperately loves his country and wants its politics to embody that love.

Obama is the vehicle to which Kmiec has fastened this love of country in 2008. Obama’s call for change gains much of its strength from the blunders of Bush 43. But, Kmiec sees a more important source in “the hope-filled yearning of the American heart and mind for a revived understand of the human person as committed to one another, and not merely oneself. This tradition of community and social responsibility has long been an aspect of American Catholicism.”

Kmiec is clearly a big fan of Obama but his political shift is also a turning away from the GOP. He notes his concern for the bellicosity of Bush 43’s foreign policy and the Republican Party’s failure to interest itself in social justice. But, it is abortion where Kmiec increasingly finds the GOP deficient, arguing that the pro-life movement is deceiving itself when it bets all its chips on “the remote possibility that after thirty-five years, the next president may appoint someone new to the Supreme Court of the United States who in turn – in a case not yet filed, accepted for review, briefed, or argued – might be able to persuade four of the other existing judges to overturn, against the principles of stare decisis, the decision in Roe, and then further persuade the individual legislatures of the fifty states and their governors to sign into law protections for human life.” In short, according to Kmiec, both 2008 candidates are pro-choice.

Every prelate who is thinking of denying Communion to politicians or anybody else should read Kmiec’s chapter describing what happened to him in April of this year. Only a Catholic really understands what a traumatizing thing it must have been to be denied communion. Someone in the communion line shouted “Are you judging this man, Father?” to which the priest replied “He has judged himself and been found unworthy.” Kmiec refuses to name the priest (or his religious order) but that hubristic judgmental attitude suggests it was a young priest, one who has yet to learn that sympathy with the human condition that the Lord epitomized in His own ministry. Also, a forgetful priest: He forgot that immediately before the taking of communion, the people of God acknowledge our unworthiness by saying, “Lord I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed.” We know we are not worthy to receive communion for our own merits but we know, too, that the healing word of God was spoken on a hillside in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

This book is a great help for those Catholics who are wrestling with their voting decision, not only in this election, but in all elections. While Kmiec focuses on Obama, the issues are perennial and will come up so long as Catholics are engaged in public life. His final chapter on “Catholic Officials and Catholic Voters – When Law and Morality Disagree” is a short, concise introduction to an enormously complicated topic. In short, this book is a must read for all serious Catholics. You may agree with Kmiec or not, but you cannot ignore his arguments.

Michael Sean Winters

The Senate Throws a Life Raft to the Economy

2008-10-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

As FDR understood, in politics, the metaphor is the thing.
The great ship of state was sailing in the ocean when two men fell overboard, Mr. Wall Street and Mr. Main Street. Their fall was entirely the fault of Mr. Wall Street but both were drowning. You would like to be able to throw a life jacket to Mr. Main Street and let Mr. Wall Street drown, but there are no life jackets. There is only a life raft. So, if you want to save Mr. Main Street you need to throw the raft into the water, knowing that Mr. Wall Street will also be able to climb on board and save himself. What do you do? You throw the life raft and save them both.
That is what the Senate did tonight.
Michael Sean Winters

Great Electoral College Map!

2008-10-01T04:15:00.001-07:00

Readers will have discovered the RealClearPolitics site with current polling data which we have linked at left. But, if you click on the tab marked "electoral maps" you will discover the best interactive map of the electoral college. It shows which states are solid or leaning for the candidates and which are toss-ups. You can hit "no toss-ups" and it awards the close states to the candidate with the narrow lead in the polls. You can flip states from red to blue and back again to see how one state affects the totals. Remember, there is not one national election on Nov. 4 but 51 individual elections, and this map shows how that is playing out.

The (Early) Voting Begins!

2008-10-01T04:09:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama took the lead in the presidential race yesterday. No, not the polls, although he has certainly taken the lead there. Voting began for real yesterday as new state laws that allow early voting and campaigns seek to take advantage.

In Columbus, Ohio in 2004, voters waited in long lines to cast their ballots. At some polling places the wait was more than an hour. People with two jobs may not be able to afford that kind of time on a Tuesday. Yesterday, an early voting polling station opened in Columbus and, again, there was a long line: College students had camped out the night before to be the first people to vote the next morning. They were the first to cast their ballots in the 2008 election and, given Obama’s strength among young, college age voters, it is safe to guess that he has taken an early lead in this most swinging of swing states.

In Oregon, this will be the second election in which there are no polling stations. Everyone votes by mail in Oregon. Nationwide, as many as one-third of votes are expected to be cast early. In 2004, only 20 percent of ballots were cast in advance of election day.

Anything that increases the franchise is a good thing. For many voters, balancing multiple jobs and the demand of parenthood, getting to the polls is difficult enough, but getting there and finding a long line is sure to discourage at least some would-be voters. Still, I worry about the effects of beginning the process so early. What if developments in the last week of the race, or even in the remaining debates, might cause someone to change their mind? A two week window seems appropriate but a full month of early voting seems a little long.

Additionally, the objective of greater voter participation might be achieved by declaring election day a public holiday. I prefer this alternative because it would emphasize the civic nature of voting: It is something we do all together, even though we guard the privacy of our choice. Of course, we would still need absentee ballots for those who cannot make it to the polls on election day whether it is a holiday or not. But, voting is like liturgy: It is a communal act, not an individual act. Certainly, students on college campuses that do not have early voting should insist that classes be canceled for part or all of election day so that they can vote.

The other innovation in Ohio that is worthy of note is the ability to register and obtain an absentee ballot at the same time. One of the challenges for a campaign’s field team is to get people to register and then remember to get them out to vote later. In Ohio this year, it is one-stop shopping for first time voters and that will increase turnout considerably.

Campaigns need to adjust their strategies to take account of the new election rules. In 2000, 2002, & 2004, the Republican Party unleashed a highly effective ground operation, aimed at identifying key voters and getting them to the polls. In critical swing districts, like Connecticut’s Second District, this push in the final 72 hours made the difference. In a state with early voting, a field operation has to take account of more than the final 72 hours. Ad buys, usually concentrated in the final week or two of a campaign, now need to reach voters a month before election day.

By virtually all accounts, the Obama campaign has the most effective ground operation any Democrat has mounted in years. This is especially important because a key part of his support comes from young people who are notorious for not voting in numbers equal to their share of the population. As we look at the polling in swing states, and worry about the Bradley effect, a good ground operation may make the difference.

Michael Sean Winters

Obama's Policies Would Not Reduce Abortion

2008-09-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

Sidney Callahan’s recent post both proposes and endorses an increasingly common claim which goes something like: "Yes, Sen. Obama’s views on abortion – inparticular, his support for the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision – are misguided. However, ‘his policies and programs more comprehensively follow Catholic socialteaching than McCain's -- and they even result in fewer abortions.’"
Now, I know a fair bit about the matter, and do not believe that, in fact, Sen.Obama’s "policies and programs more comprehensively follow Catholic social teaching than McCain's." Sen. Obama, for example, strongly opposes any use ofpublic funds to help low-income children attending Catholic schools, but theChurch’s social teaching points clearly in the other direction.

In addition,Republicans, at present, better appreciate the demands of religious liberty,and the connection between so-called "social issues" and the common good, than do Democrats. But, in any event, let’s say (as we should) that with both candidates, from the perspective of the Church’s social-teaching tradition, it is clearly a mixed bag. What is not true, though – even if pro-life Democrats sincerely want it to be true – is that the policies that will pursued by anObama administration (and a Pelosi / Reid Congress) will "result in fewer abortions."

The "Obama will reduce abortions"claim rests on the assumption that increases in various social-welfare programs will reduce what the Democratic Party’s platform calls the "need" for abortions. Let’s assume this is true. In order to have any confidence, though, that an Obama administration’s policies would reduce abortions, it is essential to consider – a Catholic aspiring to faithful citizenship should consider – the facts that, for example, (a) in an Obama administration, public funding for abortion would increase, both here and abroad; (b) President Obama supports, as does the Democratic Party’s congressional leadership, the Freedom of Choice Act, which will un-do a wide range of regulations (e.g., informed-consent laws, the Hyde Amendment) that clearly do reduce the number of abortions; (c) PresidentObama has said that he opposes federal funding for crisis pregnancy centers,whose work helps encourage pregnant women to reject abortion; (d) PresidentObama would use the bully pulpit of the presidency to proclaim and defend the view that the abortion license is a fundamental constitutional right; (e)President Obama would appoint federal judges who would vote to invalidate even reasonable regulations of abortion, and (f) President Obama supports massive increases in federal funding for research that involves the creation and destruction of human embryos. I do not believe that the abortion issue is just about the numbers; it reallymatters, wholly and apart from abortion rates, that our fundamental law not endorse the view that unborn children ought not to be protected in law.

That said, when it comes to abortion, the numbers-argument does not support the election of Sen. Obama. It has been estimated, for example, that the passage of the Freedom of Choice Act would itself result in 125,000 more abortions each year. Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life, has observed: [B]y even the most conservative estimate, there are more than one million Americans alive today because of the Hyde Amendment, which cut off federal funding for abortion starting in 1976. Some of them are probably turning out for the Obama "Faith, Family, Values Tour" meetings. Even the Alan Guttmacher Institute (linked to Planned Parenthood) and NARAL admit that the Hyde Amendment (and the similar policies adopted by many states) have resulted in many, many babies being born who otherwise would have been aborted -- indeed,the pro-abortion groups periodically put out papers complaining about this. So, the Hyde Amendment is a proven "abortion reduction" policy, big time. Yet Obama advocates repeal of the Hyde Amendment -- and he also wants to enact a national health insurance program that would also mandate coverage of abortion on demand.(As a state legislator, he voted directly against limits on public funding of elective abortions.) If he were elected president and succeeded in implementing these policies, the likely result would be a very substantial increase in the number of abortions performed in the U.S., quite possibly an increase in the hundreds of thousands annually.

To be sure, there is plenty of room for reasonable, facts-based disagreement ona wide range of policy and political questions among faithful Catholics. Many faithful Catholics will, perhaps with mixed feelings, vote for Sen. Obama notwithstanding the fact that his election will set back the pro-life cause when it comes to abortion and embryo-destroying research. To be sure, our current abortion-regulation regime and practices – while gravely wrong – is not the only matter of concern for those aspiring to faithful citizenship. But, that regime and those practices do matter. And, with the election of Sen.Obama, they will get worse.

Rick Garnett

Two Cheers For Partisanship

2008-09-30T04:10:00.000-07:00

Bipartisanship has become a mantra in Washington as the nation faces an unprecedented economic crisis. And, after 20 years of slash-and-burn partisanship, there is something to be said for bipartisanship. But, yesterday the blame for Congress’s failure to structure a bailout rests partly with this concern for bipartisanship.

The President put forward a plan that would have given the Treasury Secretary unlimited control over $700 billion. The original bill actually included the provision that the Secretary’s decisions could not be challenged in the courts or by Congress. Needless to say, amidst the many novel interpretations of the Constitution put forward by the Bush Administration, this was the most outrageous. But, in the spirit of bipartisanship, the Democratic leadership of the Congress worked for a week with the administration to improve their proposal.

Last Thursday, after John McCain flew back to Washington to take part in the negotiations, the negotiations broke down as House Republicans announced their refusal to back the Bush plan. To be clear: The objections raised by the House GOP did not have to do with the Democratic amendments to the Bush plan but to the plan itself. A group of very conservative House members have lost confidence in Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson for abandoning what the conservatives believe are crucial GOP commitments to less government spending and less regulation of the free market. They would not sign on to the deal.

Another round of negotiations over the weekend brought everyone back to the same page. That same page was a muddled mess of a compromise that even its backers could scarcely explain to the American people. A group of far left Democrats and far right Republicans refused to back the measure and they defeated it.

The opposition to the bailout may lack a plan but they don’t lack for clarity. On the right, they don’t think there needs to be a plan. They support the free market and see the crisis as the result of too much regulation and government intervention in the market. Most cite Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s role in the sub-prime mortgage market. Others are more sweeping in their indictment, such as Texas Rep. Ron Paul. No longer a presidential candidate but still a libertarian wingnut, he was blaming the Federal Reserve System, not the actions of the Fed, but the fact of the Fed. You would have thought that a congressman whose district was just leveled by a hurricane would see the benefit of government intervention.

The Democrats who failed to back the plan were from the more lefty wing of the party. They objected to what they perceived as bailing out Wall Street executives whom they think should be put into early retirement, and with no golden parachute to ease the fall. This group was, in its way, even less principled than the GOP opponents if the bailout: Whatever else it did or did not do, the bailout was a slap in the face to the idea that capitalism and competition are always the best way to organize society, and that is a lesson the nation needs to learn.

So, going forward, the House Democrats should ignore the Republicans for a day or two and craft their own proposal, one that has the support of every Democratic member of the House. Keep communication with the administration open, but craft a specifically Democratic plan. Then let the GOP vote against it and the President veto it. The Senate, which is so evenly split, is dicier – Democrats there would need to make sure they have at least one or two Republicans on board. If the final Democratic measure is vetoed, at least the American people will know where the blame lies for the meltdown.

Sometimes ideological clarity will help to make future bipartisanship easier. Legislators will vote for a compromise, but they should not be expected to vote for the legislative equivalent of hash. Democrats want government intervention in the market to restore fairness as well as liquidity. Republicans want the free market to play out. Let’s give that choice to the American people on November 4.

Michael Sean Winters

Winters and Malone on The Debates

2008-09-29T09:27:00.001-07:00

Our intrepid blogger Michael Sean Winters teams up again with associate editor Matt Malone, S.J., to analyze the first presidential debate. Listen to their discussion here.

And you can subscribe to our podcast here.

Tim Reidy

Pro-Life Catholic for Obama

2008-09-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

Why am I as a 'mass going' staunchly pro life Catholic, voting for Obama? Of course I disagree with his views on Roe vs Wade, but I think that his policies and programs more comprehensively follow Catholic social teaching than McCain's--and they even result in fewer abortions.

There's a lot of evidence that providing aid and support for women, children and the poor, lowers the number of abortions. Pro lifers can choose to see present results rather than repeating exhortations for the future.

After all, to roll back and change laws in a democracy, the legislators, the courts and the majority of voters have to be convinced, and this process of moral reorientation on abortion can be a slow process. Think of the arguments you have with your friends and family.

In the interim, when immediate overthrow of a flawed law is impossible it is morally permissible, as John Paul II expresses it, to recognize "the art of the possible" and try to "limit the harm done by such a law."

Moreover, Catholic pro life advocates for Obama desperately want to limit the grave moral evils and dangers to life arising from pursuing preemptive wars, defending the use of torture, continuing the death penalty, and flouting of Constitutional and international law. As billions are spent on the destructive Iraq war, the needs of the poor, the ill and the schools are neglected, and the whole economic system falters.

Our Bishops have instructed us in the 2008 document "Faithful Citizenship," to inform our consciences and choose prudently. We must seek the common good as well as avoid evils. Bishops carry out their role of teaching and transmitting the tradition when they state Catholic social teaching in its fullness and nuance as they have here. And yes, if others in public life misrepresent Catholic doctrine, it is the Bishops' right and duty to correct them.

Moreover, in this document the Bishops firmly assert that they seek to inform consciences and "do not intend to tell Catholics for whom or against whom to vote." Yet certain Bishops (we know who they are) appear to be doing their best to coerce the conscientious decisions of their people by punitive uses of sacramental power. To deny Catholics the Eucharist because they have voted in a certain way seems to grievously overstep clerical authority as well as distort Catholic teaching on religious liberty.

While I think Obama is far and away the candidate most completely in agreement with Catholic teaching on peace and justice, I would never want to have McCain's Catholic followers be denied communion because of their votes on preemptive war or embryonic stem cell research.

In fact such non pastoral exercises of clerical power involving worship give scandal. This is imitating Jesus? Christ the Lord showed unfailing charity to all, even his enemies. He welcomes all who seek him.

Jesus teaches, heals, inspires and proclaims in one of my favorite scriptural verses, "Look, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut."(Rev. 3:8)

Sidney Callahan

The Pulpit & the IRS

2008-09-29T05:17:00.000-07:00

In 1936, near the end of the election campaign, a Roman Catholic priest gave a nationwide radio address endorsing Franklin Delano Roosevelt for re-election. "In this critical hour, I urge you to use every effort at your command among your relatives, friends and acquaintances in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt," concluded Msgr. John A. Ryan. The broadcast was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and much of the talk was in response to another Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin, who had been denouncing FDR.

In 1954, Congress passed a law forbidding pastors to endorse candidates from the pulpit or risk losing their tax exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. So, for legal reasons, we haven’t had Catholic priests giving endorsements in churches, although nothing in the law bans them from making endorsements in their capacity as citizens outside the confines of their church. Additionally, in 1980, Democratic Congressman Father Robert Drinan was forced to resign his seat in Congress under pressure from Pope John Paul II who did not want priests in politics, unless it was Poland of course.

This past weekend, a group of conservative, mostly evangelical, pastors decided to challenge the law banning endorsements. They gave sermons that explicitly endorsed a candidate for president. As far as the news reports indicate, the only candidate endorsed was John McCain, mostly citing his stance in opposition to both abortion and gay marriage, issues "that transcend all others" according to Rev. Ron Johnson, Jr., a pastor in Indiana who joined the protest. Rev. Johnson went on to say "The issue is not ‘Are we legislating morality?’ This issue is ‘Whose morality are we legislating?’"

Rev. Johnson is right on the second point: All legislation is in some sense a legislation of morality. The civil rights movement forced an all-white Southern morality that forbid racial integration to accept racial integration. The opposition that Pope John Paul II voiced against the Iraq War was based on moral principles, as was President Bush’s decision to pursue the war anyway. When the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was about "privacy" they begged the question that was at issue. So, yes, morality defines what we mean by justice and justice is the objective of law.
But, the good reverends should have thought twice about their protest on other grounds. For starters, these evangelical churches are the ones that distribute the bracelets that carry the simplistic slogan, "What Would Jesus Do?" or just the initials "WWJD?" As to the issue at hand, we know pretty well what Jesus did and did not do, and He did not get overly involved in politics. And, as the Catholic bishops argued in their document "Faithful Citizenship" (link at left), while some issues are more important than others, and a well informed conscience will rank the issues accordingly, abortion and gay marriage are not issues that trump all others, even though they are very important. Politics is a complicated business and reducing it to one or two issues is wrong. Similarly, and especially given the changes in the Democratic platform, an argument can be made that their policy directives will do more to reduce the abortion rate than the GOP call to overturn Roe v. Wade. You can agree with the argument or not, but you have to have an argument of your own.

Archbishop Favalora of Miami seemed to strike the right note about how churchmen should be involved in politics when he announced that none of his priests would be joining the protest. He cited several reasons, including all the good the Church accomplishes with the money they save from their tax-exempt status. "For another, ‘scriptural truth’ is not that easy to attain. Which is more ‘true’ in terms of scripture: The Old Testament passage that says ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ or Jesus’ admonition to ‘turn the other cheek’? The problem is that people often quote selectively from Scripture in order to back their own opinions. The other problem is that rarely, if ever, does an individual candidate or political party embody the gamut of ‘scriptural truth.’"

The day after the election, we will have a new President, not a new Messiah. The reason to keep religion out of partisanship is because faith will get sullied if it descends into those depths. The First Amendment protects religion from the State as much as the other way round.

Michael Sean Winters

Debate #1: The Verdicts

2008-09-27T06:19:00.000-07:00

Multiple verdicts emerged from last night’s first presidential debate, depending on what question or questions a given voter had. Overall, the cumulative answers to those questions probably made the debate a draw which is a political win for Obama.

The most important question for Obama to answer was: Is this new guy ready to be president? Verdict: Yes. Obama looked presidential, his answers displayed a wealth of knowledge on a variety of subjects and, more importantly, an ability to weigh the relative importance of discrete pieces of information and craft an overall narrative that voters could understand. His critique of McCain’s stance on Iraq was not only sharp, but showed how the obsession with Iraq had taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and other parts of the world.

The most important question for McCain to answer was: Does this guy understand what’s going on with the economy or is he out of touch? Verdict: Still deliberating. McCain conveyed that he was holding his nose on the Wall Street bailout much more effectively than Obama. On the other hand, I am sure that focus groups of unaffiliated voters love McCain’s attack on congressional earmarks, but as Obama pointed out, even if all earmarks were eliminated, the government would save $18 billion. That is a lot of money, but it is dwarfed by the $700 billion the government is committing to the Wall Street Rescue. McCain also has to drop the line “You will know their names” when discussing earmarks. Whose names? Clearly, this was once part of his stump speech but it has become garbled in translation.

The most important question for Jim Lehrer was: How to referee without intruding. Verdict: Flunked. In his effort to get the candidates to speak directly with one another, he sounded like a fifth grade teacher settling a playground fight and made himself, not the candidates, the center of attention. If he had wanted the two to speak directly to each other, that should have been made clear beforehand. If they still insisted on facing him or the audience or the cameras, that is their choice, not his.

What does last night’s debate tell us about their performances in the upcoming debates? Verdict: Everything. Both men had plenty of opportunity to address what all commentators agreed were their core problems. For Obama, he is too cool by half, nothing makes him flustered, voters who want to know he will fight for them see a man who will not fight for anything. For McCain, he needs to show the same passion for pocketbook issues that he does for foreign policy. Neither candidate achieved this. Obama was in command of the issues and of himself but his heart was never on his sleeve. McCain was halting, not particularly coherent when discussing the economy, but became sharper and more engaged when discussing the former Soviet republic of Georgia. He also looked ridiculous delivering applause lines from his stump speech when the audience was not allowed to applaud.

So, while the early polling shows the night a win for Obama, I suspect that candidates who were leaning one way or another found plenty to confirm their lean. There was no single mistake by either that could become a soundbite on Youtube, played over and over again. Obama was Obama. McCain was McCain.

In the grand scheme of the campaign, however, a draw is a big win for Obama. Not only was last night McCain’s last real chance to showcase his foreign policy strong suit, he needed a game changer and he did not get it. Obama, like Ronald Reagan in 1980, just needed to show up and look presidential. That may not sway as many undecided voters his way as it did for Reagan because of lingering racism but I am guessing that it will swing enough of them in the key swing states.

Michael Sean Winters

The Bailout & The Blame

2008-09-26T12:19:00.001-07:00

In some quarters – including, I think, in several of the posts on this blog – a particular narrative about the current crisis seems to have taken hold. It goes something like this: "The current woes – which most of us really couldn’t describe, let alone explain – are the result of deregulatory policies and free-market ideology. What we are now seeing is the fruits of selfish (i.e., Republican) action and venal inattention. The blame for the bailout, and for the costs it will impose on regular people, is fairly placed on President Bush, free markets, deregulation, the Republican Congress, and (strangest of all) John McCain."

This narrative is politically useful, no doubt. But because this blog is not merely an outlet for partisan point-scoring, but is instead intended to be, in a meaningful sense, educational, it seems necessary to point out the fact that this narrative corresponds imperfectly to reality.
Fannie and Freddie, and their woes, are not the results of free-market ideology or excessive de-regulation; rather, their very existence (as GSE’s) is in tension with that ideology. They and their practices (and failures) are not the product of "conservative" legislators, but of "liberal" ones, who sought to find ways to provide housing to low-income people *precisely* by end-running market incentives and pressures. For more than a decade, it has been conservatives and Republicans – like John McCain – who have been calling for closer supervision of Fannie and Freddie’s practices; and Democrats who have resisted such calls. (The recipients of Fannie’s and Freddie’s campaign contributions are, overwhelmingly, powerful Democrats, including Sen. Obama.)

If anyone has been proved horribly wrong in this crisis, it is Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Charles Schumer, not John McCain; if anyone has been vindicated, it is certainly not Sen. Obama (or European-style business regulations). Look again: The Democrats have ignored calls for regulation and oversight, while receiving hefty campaign contributions. They have controlled the Congress for the last two years. And yet it’s the Republicans’ fault that Fannie and Freddie are now at the heart of the credit crisis?

I share the view, of course, of Michael Sean Winters that Catholic Social Teaching does and must speak to this and similar crises. Of course there is a moral dimension to all this. The Catholic Social Tradition, however, is not merely a set of populist talking points. To say that the economic order exists in order to contribute to the authentic flourishing of the human person is not (by a long shot) to answer any particular question about how what laws and policies should be regarding sub-prime mortgages and mortgages for low-income would-be borrowers. It is quite mistaken, then, to diagnose the current crisis as involving merely the attempted exploitation by the rich capitalists of the (to quote Michael) "grandmother who had earned her retirement or a married couple trying to put money away for their child’s college education." At least as much a part of the story – if only the pro-Obama press would tell it – is the fact that deciding, in boom times, to get Fannie and Freddie in the business of making risky loans (and, in many cases, strong-arming banks to provide risky loans), is, well, risky.

Rick Garnett

The Dark Knight and the Bailout

2008-09-26T04:05:00.000-07:00

In the summer’s box office smash “The Dark Knight,” the Joker, played by Heath Ledger, does not run around Gotham spreading evil per se. He spreads chaos. And then watches good people choose evil in the midst of the chaos. Yesterday, for a variety of reasons, the discussion of what government should do in response to the economic meltdown on Wall Street turned into chaos. It is not a good sign.

Part of the problem was the histrionic role John McCain crafted for himself. There appeared to be no good reason for the White House meeting between congressional leaders, the President and the two candidates. And, most times, a meeting without an achievable agenda turns into a nightmare. So far from rising above politics by “suspending” his campaign, McCain brought presidential politics into the delicate negotiations.

Why are the negotiations delicate? Because what is required in this situation is a bit of courage. Congressional offices were flooded with calls opposing the bailout. Most people would like to see Wall Street financiers get their comeuppance. But, if Wall Street fails, Americans who rely on credit – small businesses with seasonal fluctuations, farmers, banks – all will find their access to credit restricted making it more difficult to conduct business, creating conditions for more economic decline. So, Congress must do what is right not what is popular, that is, they must act with political courage. Alas, if one is looking for cowardice in the halls of power, the environment is target rich, but the instances of courage are few and far between,

House Republican members staged a revolt of sorts yesterday, refusing to sign onto to the President’s plan, even as it has been modified by negotiations all week. They promoted an alternative that, among other things, called for more deregulation. This is crazy talk. The lack of regulation got us into this mess. (Democrats should be ashamed for signing on to deregulation of the financial markets in 1999!) The idea that somehow the invisible hand of the market will solve the mess that the invisible hand created is absurd.

Why did the GOP members rally to an ideologically pure, laissez-faire alternative? Because they can. While the bailout may have a huge impact on the presidential race, it won’t on most House races. 98 percent of House members routinely win re-election. Re-districting has allowed politicians to draw the boundaries of their districts in ways that virtually ensure their re-election with computer-generated voting analyses. The greatest threat to re-election is not from the opposing party but from a primary challenger who plays more effectively to the party’s base. In primary elections, fewer people vote, so appealing to the more extreme elements of the base helps. Isolated from any electoral accountability, House members of both parties stay clear of moderation.

So, the economic crisis on Wall Street is coupled with a systemic political problem and the nation waits for the government to act. The president is hobbled both by his abysmal approval ratings and his previous record of using fear to whip up support only to have the object of his fears prove less than compelling over time. The Democrats have to fess up that they have done little in the one and one-half years they have been in charge of Congress to create the regulations that would have prevented these kinds of problems. And almost everybody is not likely to have a real electoral challenge in November so they have no real accountability to the electorate. That is not a recipe for a bold program to re-order the nation’s financial structure.

McCain and Obama have until 9 p.m. tonight to decide where they stand on the bailout. If they come down on opposite sides of this issue, then the chaos will deepen. If they come down on the same side, they can give cover for their congressional allies to do the right thing. If you like high drama, this is it. Unlike “The Dark Knight” however, this is not fiction. The Joker wrote, "Why So Serious?" after perpetrating his crimes. In Washington, today is a time for everyone to be serious.

Michael Sean Winters

McCain's Stunt, John Paul's Principles & Obama's Opportunity

2008-09-25T04:46:00.000-07:00

Who knew that John McCain was his own stuntman? What else to call his decision to “suspend” his campaign and fly back to Washington to help solve the economic crisis. Was McCain earnest about the importance of being back in the Senate or was he merely confused about the word order of the Oscar Wilde play?

McCain has admitted to no special expertise in complex economic matters, despite chairing the Commerce Committee of the Senate for many years. Nor do complex legislative negotiations necessarily benefit from having “mavericks” involved. Nor did any of the lead congressional or administration negotiators – not Treasury Secretary Paulson nor Congressman Barney Frank nor Senator Dodd – call for McCain’s help. The negotiations, by all reports, were proceeding well when John McCain decided he was needed. Rep. Frank, the funniest as well as one of the smartest members of Congress, was having none of it: “We’re trying to rescue the economy, not the McCain campaign.”

If McCain’s polls numbers had been on the upswing, his move might have been seen as disinterested. Instead, it looks like a ploy, a gimmick, a stunt. You have to be careful with such stunts. Yesterday afternoon, it looked like the McCain camp had beaten Obama to a bipartisan punch, that he had outwitted his opponent, and changed what had been a bad storyline. But, precisely because his move was seen as political in nature, it is doubtful that he will gain much from his intervention except the wrath of some in the GOP base who have rebelled against the President’s proposals. Complex economic realities will not be solved by the heroic intervention of anyone, least of all when there is not much heroism in the act. McCain did not look presidential yesterday. He looked frantic to change his poll numbers. Stunts will not change anything.

Principles, on the other hand, are especially important in a time of crisis. Part of the economic crisis is complicated and financial. Part of it is moral. In 1981, Pope John Paul II issued his first (and favorite) encyclical on social justice, Laborem Exercens. (Link is at left with other historic Church documents) “[T]he error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever man is in a way treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work-that is to say, where he is not treated as subject and maker, and for this very reason as the true purpose of the whole process of production.”(Chapter 7) The Pope’s highly philosophic words are not the stuff of a 30-second campaign spot, but Barack Obama would do well to consult, and repeat, the distinction that Pope John Paul II made in homier words: the human person is not a means, or a thing, or a worker-bee, or a cog in someone else’s economic wheel.

Part of the horror of the current crisis is that some Wall Street companies clearly did not give a hoot about the average investor or the average homeowner. The average person who invested with Lehman Brothers could not be expected to know how to value these “financial instruments” that bundled bad mortgages and sold them at inflated costs to unsuspecting buyers. Indeed, one of the most difficult problems still on the negotiators’ table is the question of how to assess the value of these mortgage-backed securities. But, the captains of high finance did not care. They did not care if the homeowner was offered a loan they could not afford. They did not care if the bundling of these mortgages on the belief that housing prices would go up forever bore a frightening resemblance to a ponzi scheme. They saw the chance for a quick profit, and they took it. The average investor was a means to their end.

Obama does not need to embrace Catholic social teaching about the economy, but he needs to speak to the moral aspect of the economic crisis. The crisis is rooted in the fact that Wall Street forgot that the money at issue was not just a dollar figure on a balance sheet but the life savings of a human person, a grandmother who had earned her retirement or a married couple trying to put money away for their child’s college education.

In the 1930s, Msgr. John A. Ryan denounced the “economic dictatorship” that controlled Wall Street. His attacks were echoed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt who spoke forcefully against “economic tyranny” and argued that “the collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it.” In doing his debate prep, Obama would do well to consult the words of FDR who so effectively channeled both progressive and Catholic beliefs about social justice. FDR discovered his "rendezvous with destiny" by speaking in moral terms about economic difficulties and Obama's destiny lay along the same path.

Michael Sean Winters

Where's George Bush?

2008-09-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

I remember a conversation I had with a Washington sage in December of 2000, shortly after the Supreme Court stopped the counting of votes in Florida, awarding the presidency to George W. Bush. “The country will be fine. It will be like the 1840s and 1850s,” my friend said. “No one remembers the presidents from those decades but we all remember Clay, Calhoun and Webster. Congress will be the center of government.” In the event, 9/11 changed all that. George W. Bush used signing statements, invocations of his authority as commander-in-chief, bizarre theories of executive power, and his personal and political prowess with the GOP leadership in the Congress to become the most powerful president in history.

But, where was he this week? He appeared in the Rose Garden last Friday with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. He issued a statement on Monday. But, mostly, he has left the talking to Paulson and others.

Bush, you may recall, cited his MBA (the first presidential candidate to have one) as one of his principle credentials when he ran for president in 2000. And, he had “run” a business, if by “running” you mean getting a sweetheart political deal to manage a baseball team in one of the fastest growing markets in the country. Why did this economically savvy president not take to the airwaves to calm the nation, explain the economic crisis, and outline the government’s plan for action? Instead, we were made to feel that the W. in his name stood for Waldo, as in “Where’s Waldo?”

I will admit that the issues involved in the Wall Street meltdown are complicated. But, not that complicated. I never took an economics class in my life, but just from reading the papers it is clear that Wall Street engaged in risky behavior – the kind of behavior that Republicans were championing just two weeks ago – and had built a ponzi scheme of so-called “financial instruments” upon the home mortgage market. Greed doing what greed does, namely infecting everything it touches and expanding its reach wherever it can, went from being the engine of honest capitalism to the much-denounced cause of the crisis. How can the heart of the economic system be the cause of the problem?

Less clear is what should be done about it. Why not let investors hang out to dry? What would happen on Main Street if the stock market crashed? Many Americans have their 401k plans in stocks and would hate to see those depleted, but is it that much better to see their taxes go up paying for a bailout that would benefit the barons of Wall Street who created this mess as much or more than it would protect the average investor’s 401k?

Yesterday, Vice-President Dick Cheney went to Capitol Hill to drum up support for the administration’s bailout plan. His meeting with Republican congressional leaders did not go well. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a staunch Republican, gave voice to a widely held sentiment when he said that “Americans can no longer trust the economic information they are getting from this administration.” Another GOP lawmaker said that Cheney was the wrong guy to send to Capitol Hill: “The problem is that they’ve used up a lot of goodwill.” Nothing happens in a vacuum: The bullying of Congress for much of the past eight years has come back to haunt the White House exactly when it needs support.

Sic transit gloria mundi. These words were chanted by a Franciscan friar in front of a newly elected Pope just before his coronation as the friar burned flax, a plant that is quickly and thoroughly consumed by fire. The hubris of George W. Bush for the past eight years has resulted in his inability to show his face when the country needs its president. Like all who hold that high office, Mr. Bush must worry about his place in history. The thought should be haunting him at night as the nation looks to the Senate for leadership.

Michael Sean Winters

The Visible Hand in Capitalism

2008-09-23T04:09:00.000-07:00

It’s not every day that I get to agree with conservative writer Bill Kristol, so I grab the chance when it comes. In his column at the New York Times yesterday, Kristol seconded the proposal of an un-named friend that the bailout proposal before Congress include this provision: “Any institution selling securities under this legislation to the Treasury Department shall not be allowed to compensate any officer or employee with a higher salary next year than that paid the president of the United States.” Bravo.

If you doubted Kristol was repeating a GOP heresy, ask why his interlocutor wished to remain anonymous?

Kristol believes that this provision would prevent companies that did not really need help from applying for it. I suspect that determination will be made by investors in the weeks ahead. Any company that does not dump its bad, bundled “financial instruments” by selling them to the Treasury will be eaten alive in the market.

The bundling of home mortgages into securities on the belief that housing prices would only go up turned Wall Street brokers into corrupt agents of a complicated ponzi scheme: So long as everyone kept buying, all would be well, but once the buying stopped, the whole game would be exposed and the house of cards, in this case a house of credit cards, would come tumbling down. There is no reason, repeat no reason, to respect or reward these barons of high finance who sold their souls and are now reaping the whirlwind. They either knew what they were doing or, as the law states it, they should have known. There was something pathetic about Treasury Secretary Paulson’s concern for these fast-falling oligarchs. If they have to forfeit their multi-million dollar mortgages on their vacation homes in the Hamptons, at least it is only a vacation home. Many average Americans lost their only homes this year, and those homes were not in Amagansett.

Democrats in Congress are pushing for a less punitive restriction than Kristol’s. They are also insisting that mortgage companies be forced to negotiate lower rates for average homeowners who risk losing their homes. And, in this morning’s Washington Post, E.J. Dionne highlights a proposal by Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island to give taxpayers stock in the companies that participate in the bailout: if the taxpayer is taking the risk, she should get the reward. If the GOP plan can properly be called “socialism for the rich” the Reed proposal is “capitalism for the taxpayer.” Through the looking glass Alice!

It will be fun to see how fast the free-market rats flee jump from the sinking ship. The Bush administration has signed on. John McCain, who told us in his acceptance speech that he wanted government to get out of the way will certainly endorse this instance of government getting in the way. A few principled conservatives in very safe districts are begging off the bailout, but the fact is something must be done. At his ranch in California, Ronald Reagan, who famously stated that “government is not the solution, it is the problem” is turning over in his grave. Government is now the only solution because the businessmen Reagan celebrated as the very embodiment of Americanism have failed both financially and morally.

Politically, the real winner last week was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Whenever an economic crisis brings comparisons to the Great Depression, Americans, especially older Americans, turn their thoughts to FDR who pulled America out of that crisis, psychologically, politically and, finally, economically. The "invisible hand" of market forces has created a mess and the visible hand of government must restore balance to the free enterprise system.

Obama is Roosevelt’s heir in this election, so the benefit will accrue to him if he plays his cards right. If I were working on debate preparations with the Illinois senator, I would be having him read Roosevelt’s fireside chats. FDR understood that in times of crisis, Americans want their government to do something. In one of those fireside chats, on May 8, 1933, FDR told the nation “I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average, both for myself and for the team.” If Obama can channel the spirit of FDR that resides in those words “for myself and for the team” he will win the election.

Michael Sean Winters

The Election & The Court

2008-09-23T03:54:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday’s edition of the New York Times included an editorial, “The Candidates and the Court”, which reminded readers that the next President will almost certainly select at least one Supreme Court justice and warned that Sen. McCain “is likely to complete President Bush’s campaign to make the court an aggressive right-wing force.” In many ways, the piece echoed Prof. Cass Sunstein’s recent Boston Globe op-ed which complained about the “extremism” of Republican judicial appointees and the ominous threat they pose to “choice”.

Well, one should always take New York Times editorials about the Supreme Court with a grain of salt. In the bizarro-world from which they proceed, “extreme” is simply code for “at odds with the preferred, left-leaning policy outcomes of those who write editorials for the New York Times” while those whose decisions facilitate those outcomes are, of course, “moderate.”
But even if the Times is an unreliable source when it comes to understanding the Court, and the Constitution, the editorial does get one thing right: The President does nominate federal judges, and it seems pretty clear that Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain have different ideas about such judges’ role and responsibilities. So, what should Catholics think? Many Americans say that “the courts” are a major factor when they evaluate candidates. Should they be? Does the Court really matter?

Short answer(s): Yes, it does, but not as much as people think, and more than it should.
The Court matters “not as much as people think”, because most cases are not ideologically charged, 5-4 splits, but instead involve the lawyerly resolution of technical disputes about the interpretation of federal statutes. And, of course, “We the People” – speaking through Congress – can always correct or undo such interpretations, if we disagree with them. So, a Catholic who prefers, for example, increased regulation of “business” need not worry too much if a “consumer” loses in a particular case; she remains free to lobby for a change in the law.

Things are different, though, when it comes to the divisive and difficult questions of morality and social policy that the Court has – in many cases, mistakenly – constitutionalized, which is why the Court matters “more than it should.” When the Court decides that We the People no longer have the right to decide certain questions – for example, should unborn children be protected in law and welcome in life – the democratic conversation is cut off, dialogue is shut down, and the chance for compromise withdrawn. Because the Court has assumed for itself the task of answering so many questions that people, quite reasonably, care so much about, the Court matters “more than it should”, and so it matters who picks our federal judges. Catholics should know, then, that federal judges selected by a President McCain would be (much) more likely to, for example, permit reasonable regulations of abortion, religious expression in the public square, and legislative experiments with school choice than would judges appointed by his rival. This is a fact. And it matters.

Rick Garnett

Virtue Has Its Virtues in Politics

2008-09-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

How about doing virtue scans on the candidates in this crucial election? Surely such background checks and assessments would lead to better choices than simply listening to campaign rhetoric and spin. Predictions of actual responses to future challenges can be most accurately based on virtuously developed habits of moral behavior.

Virtues are on my mind because I’m working my way through a young friend’s admirable new book, Introducing Moral Theology: True Happiness and the Virtues by William C. Mattison III. Bill has done a fine job presenting the importance of the moral virtues, and in an engaging way that will appeal to his college students.

Chapters discussing the different virtues are interspersed with discussions of test cases, such as alcohol use and premarital sex. The first half of the book is devoted to the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, justice and prudence, which can be open to every reasonable person, and then the last half of the book treats the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

As I read along, the thought experiment of assessing the present political candidates on their respective cardinal virtues became irresistible, however rough and ready the judgments.

First, the virtue of temperance seems to be equally displayed by the two slates. As a matter of fairness only present adult behavior should be counted. McCain is no longer a beer drinking and hell raising young midshipman and naval aviator, and Barack Obama the exemplary family man has left experimentation and inhaling far behind in the past.

Courage and fortitude also appear evenly matched on the tickets. Obama has had to overcome barriers of racism and Biden has triumphed over family tragedy and serious illness. Sarah Palin has taken on sexism, entrenched establishments and met her own family challenges.

Most famously, John Sidney McCain III has displayed the courage of his family’s military tradition in bravely enduring torture and the after effects of imprisonment in Hanoi Hilton.

While profiles of courage abound equally in our present election choices, the virtues of justice and prudence are definitely not evenly distributed. Obama and Biden in their past careers show a far greater concern for liberty, equality, peace and justice. They do not display misplaced loyalty on behalf of family and friends.

The gap grows even larger when it comes to the all important virtue of prudence. Prudence is “the virtue of choosing well” or the acquired capacity of accurately sizing up situations and making good practical decisions. Prudence is the preeminent virtue since as “the charioteer of the virtues,” it governs when and where a person deploys other virtues. Unfortunately, courage displayed in pursuing a bad cause can be dangerous.

Prudence comes from past experiences in making wise, responsible, well thought through choices-- not impulsive and not flamboyant ones. An unwillingness to accept guidance from others is also fatal to prudence.

In my estimation, John McCain and Sarah Palin, for all of their lively magnetic qualities are far outdistanced by Obama and Biden in exercising the virtue of prudence.

Appropriately, Biden and Obama have both taught constitutional law, and are well versed in the most prudent instrument for governing ever invented. When the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution are arbitrarily flouted, disasters descend.

While no voter can control the future in this precarious and unsettled period they can seek to elect the most virtuous and prudent leaders possible. My own choice is obvious, and as my granddaughter's answering message on her cell phone has it, "I think you know what to do."

Sidney Callahan

Four Soundbites (& Venues) For Obama

2008-09-22T04:19:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama’s convention speech was the last time he had the undivided attention of the American people to make a sustained argument for his candidacy. The debates will be critical as everyone agrees. But, in the meantime, he can frame the race by delivering four soundbites that hit on key issues and, just as important, flesh out what he means by change and the promise it holds for the voters who will decide the election. Those voters are white, ethnic Catholics with no college education, who make less than fifty thousand dollars a year, living in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan and Latinos who will prove decisive in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico.

1) “If we could convert our factories in a few months after Pearl Harbor from making cars to making tanks and planes, we can convert our factories today from making gas guzzlers to hybrids. Don’t tell me we can’t do that – We haven’t tried!”
Setting: In front of a factory in Michigan, ideally one that was built before World War II but that is less important than the can-do message. In the event, he is not only sketching a very specific kind of change that would improve the environment and bring much-needed jobs to hard-hit Michigan, he is linking that promise to a specific history that is a source of national pride. As an added benefit, it touches his personal biography: Obama’s grandmother went to work in a factory during WWII.

2) “You shouldn’t need a college degree to fulfill your dreams.” Setting: In a speech to students at a vocational school in Ohio. Obama often refers to the difficulty in affording college as an example of the economic tough times. But, many people are not going to college and non-college, blue collar voters has been a particularly difficult demographic for him to crack. This is a line that should have been in his acceptance speech but it speaks directly to those voters whom Hillary Clinton called the forgotten and the invisible. Obama needs to stop forgetting them.

3) “Do we really want government agents separating parents from their children? Pope Benedict was right: We need family-friendly immigration reform.” Setting: The St. Bridget’s Church in Pottsville, Iowa, the town that witnessed a large immigration raid last May. The church became a place of sanctuary after the raid as the town struggled to find homes for the children whose parents were arrested. This is the message Latinos care about but it also resonates with traditional ethnic Catholics in the East. This family-first approach also resonates with evangelicals. Not least, the issue makes McCain squirm because he had to backtrack on his previous support for humane immigration reform in order to secure the GOP nomination.

4) “You all helped John F. Kennedy win his battle against anti-Catholic bigotry. I need you to help us win another battle against bigotry today.” Setting: The monument to the “Fighting Irish Brigade” at Gettysburg, a brigade that consisted of Irish Catholic regiments from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York and fought a crucial part of the battle on Day 2 at Gettysburg. Obama is reluctant to face the race issue head-on, understandably. But, circumstances might require it, as they did last spring, and for the same reason: Pastor Jeremiah Wright. In retrospect, this monument might have been a better backdrop for the speech about race Obama gave at the Constitution Museum in Philadelphia, a speech that played soaringly to his vision of America but did not necessarily connect with the white, ethnic Catholics whose votes he needs. But, if Wright or some other cause requires Obama to address the race issue, he should tie his struggle to the fight against bigotry that Kennedy faced. As Governor Barry Schweitzer said in his speech to the Democratic National Convention, he grew up in a home which, like virtually every Catholic home, had a crucifix and a picture of JFK.

Obama needs to keep the focus off of the cultural template in which he is an elitist and McCain (the guy with nine houses) is the average Joe. That means directing the message. He needs to talk to swing voters about their memories and their dreams, and connect them to his vision for America’s future. Pictures are worth a thousand words and, at this stage of the campaign, you don’t get a thousand words. But, a few well-placed soundbites, with the right backdrop, could help Obama connect with the voters who will decide his political fate in November.

Michael Sean Winters

Questions for the Presidential Candidates

2008-09-19T13:37:00.001-07:00

One week from today, the eyes of voters will turn to Mississippi for the first presidential debate of the 2008 general election. The editors of America have put together a list of some of the questions they feel should be asked. The online editorial can be found here.

Matt Malone, S.J.

Why Are Some States Purple?

2008-09-19T04:31:00.000-07:00

It is a good thing for democracy that more states are in play this year. Too often, the debates, the television ads, the Get-Out-The-Vote organizations, ignore large parts of the country because they are considered indelibly red or blue. A Republican could, in theory, try to contest Rhode Island or a Democrat contest South Carolina, but it would be a waste of resources. This year, the larger pool of states up for grabs means that more people will be exposed to the political process and, hopefully, will focus on the issues more closely. But, this larger electoral pie begs the question: Why are some states purple?

The most common reason for going purple is a change in demographics. In Virginia, over the past few years, the suburban communities outside of Washington have been growing like wild goldenrod. Many of the new residents are more affluent and socially liberal than the farming communities they are displacing. There is also a large contingent of Latinos in the northern Virginia electorate. The principle demographic change this year has been the increase in voter registration numbers in these heavily Democratic counties in the north and in the heavily African-American counties south of Richmond.

These demographic changes can be accentuated by finding the right, purplish, political leadership at the state level. In Virginia, the current Governor is a centrist Catholic, Tim Kaine, whose ambivalence on issues like the legality of abortion and enforcement of the death penalty could not be cast as weakness by his political opponents because of Kaine’s ability to tie that ambivalence to the admittedly complicated task of intermingling one’s Catholic beliefs with practical political decision-making. For example, on the death penalty, Kaine has said he opposes it and wants the state to oppose it, but that it is unlikely to do so and that he would fulfill his oath of office to enforce the laws and order executions. His predecessor, Mark Warner, shed the liberal elite label in part by buying a NASCAR team and campaigning heavily in the state’s rural areas as a non-ideological guy who could fix the fiscal mess the GOP had created. (Sound familiar?) Warner is facing his predecessor, Republican Jim Gilmore, in Virginia’s U.S. Senate race and Warner is leading in the polls by almost twenty-five points.

Virginia, however, has not voted for a Democrat in a presidential contest since 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won in a landslide. Still, the combination of changing demographics, respected local Democratic office holders, and a spike in voter registration among African-Americans and young people, all have made Obama think he can win it. The most recent polls show McCain holding a slight lead of two or three points in the Old Dominion. Conversely, in Georgia, the Obama campaign has pulled its advertising buys in that state after they did not meet their voter registration goals and McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin solidified the GOP brand for Christian conservatives.

Michigan is a reliably Democratic state with a frighteningly unpopular Democratic governor. The Detroit area has a long history of racial tension dating back to the 1968 riots: It remains one of the most segregated cities in America. The Southwestern part of the state is home to many Christian conservatives, such as the Seventh Day Adventist community built up around their flagship Andrews University and an array of denominational organizations, such as publishing houses, that surround it. Macomb County outside Detroit is the home of the original “Reagan Democrats,” lifelong Democrats who nonetheless voted for Reagan in 1980. Still, there have been no huge demographic change to alter the political landscape, except for the wild card issue of Obama’s race.

Obama did not compete in the Democratic primary here because the state party moved its primary date forward, breaking the rules of the Democratic National Committee. McCain lost the GOP primary here to Mitt Romney, whose father had been a governor here, by nine points. In addition to the unpopularity of the state’s Democratic governor, the mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, just resigned his office as part of a plea bargain that has him headed to jail.

Colorado looks more like Virginia than Michigan. Population growth in liberal parts of the state combined with a moderate Democrat in the governorship. In addition, the state has a popular first-term Democratic Latino Senator, Ken Salazar. The Democrats decided to hold their convention in Denver in part to highlight the changing politics of the state. Most polls have Obama leading by a small margin.

Virginia, Michigan and Colorado could join such perennial toss-ups as Ohio and Florida as three of the most hotly contested purple states in the nation. Other states that the Obama campaign thought might be in play – Georgia, Montana, North Dakota – have all been moving slowly but steadily back into the GOP fold. The McCain would love to make a play at New Jersey, but advertising in the New York media market is cost-prohibitive. Barring a major development, or major mistake, in the race, 2008 will have more purple states in play than 2004, and that is fundamentally a good thing for a democracy.

Michael Sean Winters

Vote On The Debates!!

2008-09-18T04:14:00.001-07:00

America magazine’s special election blog needs your students!

After each debate, we would like to get immediate reactions from students: Who won? The students can select in advance the student or students to whom they will email or text-message their verdicts. The tellers can then email or text-message us. We will put the results up on the website immediately and will alert your local newspapers also!

For the information to be even more meaningful, and for students to better understand the effects of debates, we suggest that before the debates, teachers poll the class on which candidate they support. If this is done, in addition to the question “Who won the debate?” we can ask “Who do you support now?” If there is an increase or decrease in support for a given candidate, the students will see the power of debates to affect elections. If there is no such change, the students will see how our political judgments are often more deeply rooted than will permit us to change our allegiance on the basis of a single debate. There is a value in both alternatives: We should be open to new information, but there is also a difference between being grounded in one’s opinions and being close-minded. Where to draw the line? And how do the presidential debates illustrate the difference? These are interesting and important questions that this exercise can open up.

So, if you are interested, please let us know by emailing us at: blogelection@aol.com.

Are Catholics Racist?

2008-09-18T04:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday’s front page story in the New York Times headlined the abortion issue and its decisive role for many Catholic voters. The pages of this blog, which is less than a fortnight old, have already shown the wide variety of opinions on that issue and I suspect there will be further debate about abortion policy and the politics of that policy as the campaign progresses.

But, what jumped off the page with the same stomach-turning surety you get when watching a slow-motion car crash at the movies was the racism of the comments made by the people at Scranton’s Holy Rosary Catholic Church. The one overt racist remark – asking if the name of the White House would be changed - caused the rest of the parishioners to “hush” him. At least everyone knew it was wrong to say that.

What has to worry the Obama campaign was the reaction of a different voter. The Times reports: “But more said they now leaned toward Mr. McCain, citing both his experience and his opposition to abortion. Paul MacDonald, a retired social worker mingling over coffee after Mass at Holy Rosary, said he had voted for Mr. Kerry four years ago and Mrs. Clinton in the primary but now planned to vote for Mr. McCain because of ‘the life issue.’” The difference between Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Barack Obama is not, alas, where they stand on “the life issue.” All three are solidly in support of Roe v. Wade and of the three, only Obama mentioned reducing abortions in their six speeches at the last two conventions.

It is, of course, possible that this voter has changed his own views on abortion in the past four months since the Democratic primary when he voted for Clinton. But, is it not more likely that the life issue has become a mask, an acceptable reason not to vote for Obama that covers the real reason: he is black.

There were few Catholics in the South and those who were there were mostly in favor of the civil rights movement. Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington began the desegregation of the Catholic schools in Maryland before the Supreme Court ordered the public schools to do so in 1954. When some conservative lay people met with O’Boyle and suggested that it would take years, maybe even a decade, for the people to be ready for desegregation, O’Boyle said, “Thank you gentlemen, but we are going to do it tomorrow.” O’Boyle gave the invocation at the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King shared his dream with America.

The tension between Catholics and blacks happened later and in the North. When Dr. King tried to end the de facto segregation of some neighborhoods in and around Chicago he met the same hatred and hostility he had met in Mississippi. Then came the “white flight” to the suburbs after the riots following Dr. King’s murder. The 1970s witnessed the conflicts over busing in many northern and Midwestern cities. At root, all of these conflicts involved the issue of tribalism or ethnic identity, an issue that goes back further than Bernstein’s “West Wide Story” and has a similarly unhappy ending.

Racism is a complicated phenomenon. I wrote about it on these pages here and Father Kavanaugh wrote about it for the magazine here. It has been mostly under the radar screen through most of the campaign. Pastors of souls should take to their pulpits in the next few weeks and discuss it openly: There are many reasons to vote for Barack Obama or to vote against him, but the color of his skin is not one of them. "Catholic" is a word with a meaning and it is the exact opposite of hateful tribalism.

Michael Sean Winters

Playing To & Against Type: Economics and Elites

2008-09-17T04:32:00.000-07:00

John McCain and the Republicans have two problems when they address the meltdown on Wall Street, and both of those problems will now be with them through the end of the campaign. Fortunately for them, the Democrats have an uncanny ability to lose an election that should be a walk in the park.

The first problem for the GOP is that they have to play against type and defend it. Republicans are the party of big business, the party of entrepreneurs, the party of businessmen and businesswomen, the Chamber of Commerce party. Except when they’re not. And, yesterday, the Bush administration agreed to nationalizing AIG, the biggest insurance company in America. That’s right. The government bought it and now runs it.

I don’t remember when was the last time I heard someone advocate nationalization of an industry, although anyone who has flown on the government-run airlines of Europe, Air France, Lufthansa and the rest, should know better than to dismiss the idea out of hand. As discussed yesterday, we live in an age that has celebrated the free market’s triumph over the planned economies of former communist states and seen that triumph in eschatological terms: Francis Fukyama’s famous book was called “The End of History” not “Capitalism is Better.” Nationalization was the kind of suggestion that you would expect from Dennis Kucinich, not from the Bush Administration.

Which leads to the second problem the GOP has, and this may prove even more intractable for them. For the next seven weeks, they have to speak about the economy, but all their applause lines are useless. At the GOP convention, McCain promised to get government out of the way and everyone stood and cheered. In that same speech, McCain inaccurately said Obama wants “government-run health care” but now that charge is not only inaccurate but it would sound ridiculous when the government is taking a much more activist posture than anything Obama has suggested. In March, McCain told the Wall Street Journal “I’m always for less regulation,” the kind of sentiment that warms the entrepreneurial hearts, but he has suddenly had to become the champion of more regulation this week.

You would think that the Democrats would know enough to just get out of the way and let the internal contradictions of the GOP’s position take hold in the imagination of the American voter. Instead, there was Obama, playing to type, flying to Hollywood for a star-studded fundraiser that was a caricature of elitism right down to having Barbra Streisand singing. This is how it is done in Hollywood. David Geffen and his pals get together and they go through their rolodex and they raise a lot of money, but they expect the candidate or the cause to pay them homage and attend an event where they can all look fabulous. I’m guessing Babs sang “Send in the Clowns”!

Obama should have been smart enough to send his regrets. The Hollywood folk still would have raised the money. But, on a day when Americans are worried about their finances, attending a glitzy fundraiser that netted $9 million was not the way for Obama to show his down-to-earth credentials. Obama gave away some of his advantage by appearing as out-of-touch personally and the GOP has become fiscally. He partially made up for it, however, with a new ad that was released this morning. Campaigns don't usually take out two minute ads at this stage of the campaign, but this is the best ad he has run all year.

Michael Sean Winters

The Big Mo' -- Part II

2008-09-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

The Big Mo' may have just shifted again. The implosion of the financial markets, which former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently called "by far" the worst economic crisis in his lifetime, has once again made the economy issue #1 in the presidential race. While the demise of Lehman Brothers and some other former financial powerhouses is bad news for the economy and for a lot of workers, at a strictly political level, it is good news for the Obama campaign.

Last week, I wrote about how momentum influences and drives an election. Over the last several weeks, the Palin pick and the Obama campaign's lack of message discipline gave McCain the chance to seize the Big Mo' by positioning himself as the agent of change. With the Wall Street disaster on the front page of every newspaper and the topic of choice around every water cooler, several things have happened:

First, people have stopped talking about Sarah Palin. That's bad news for McCain, because she is his symbol of change and 2008 is the Platonic form of a change election. Every news cycle that is dominated by Sarah Palin (the size of her crowds, her take-no-prisoners, folksy commitment to reform) is a good day for the McCain campaign, yet she is fast becoming old news.

Second, McCain has been forced to talk about the economy and, once again, he has taken very careful aim and shot himself right in the foot. For nearly the twentieth time in this election cycle, McCain told an audience (on the day of Lehman brothers bankruptcy filing) that the "fundamentals of the economy are strong." Now, to be fair, I know what he meant. The economy, though facing a crisis and almost certainly headed toward recession, is not about to fly off of a cliff. The U.S. economy is a complex system with in-built safeties designed to prevent a recession from becoming a depression.

But in politics, as we know, perception is reality. And when McCain uses this phrase, people are likely to think that he is a bit aloof when if comes to their very real pocketbook concerns, prompting among them the kind of head shaking that accompanied his assertion that he did not know how many houses he owns.

Lastly, the Obama campaign has imposed a renewed discipline on its message. It has stopped talking about Palin and is talking everywhere to anyone who will listen about the economy, the economy, the economy. U.S. voters trust the Democrats more to handle the economy and it is historically true that in bad economic times the party out of power tends to benefit. If the economy remains THE issue occupying the news cycle, the Big Mo' may move Obama's way.

Matt Malone, S.J.

Sowing and Reaping on Wall Street

2008-09-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

The campaign took a sudden turn back to reality yesterday. For weeks we were treated to discussions of who was, and was not a celebrity, lipstick on pigs, bridges to nowhere and the such. Yesterday, with the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, bargain basement sale of Merrill Lynch, and the collapse of the Dow by more than 500 points, the economy roared back to center stage like Hurricane Ike through Texas. The economic turmoil, like the destruction in Galveston, was all the more gripping because everyone appeared powerless over the forces unleashed. The economy, like the weather, is a non-predictable phenomenon, or so we have been led to believe.

What we also witnessed yesterday was the poverty of contemporary liberalism. Democratic operatives took to the cable news shows to say that the crisis had shifted the focus from cultural issues to a real issue, the economy, as if economic matters had no affect on shaping the culture, or the culture on shaping the economy, and as if economic issues were more “real” than cultural issues. Somewhere in Minnesota, the Rev. Msgr. John A. Ryan was turning over in his grave.

Msgr. Ryan was a professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America and head of the Social Action Department at the U.S. Bishops’ Conference. In 1919, he drafted the Bishops’ statement on social reconstruction in the wake of World War I and the document recommended many of the programs that we would associate with the New Deal more than twelve years later: Social Security, unemployment insurance, government employment programs, child labor laws. Indeed, Ryan became an enthusiastic supporter of and collaborator with Franklin Delano Roosevelt: In 1936, Ryan gave a nationwide radio address explicitly urging Roosevelt’s re-election that was paid for by the Democratic National Committee, showing how differently the role of religion in politics was at that time.

The New Deal was a response to the crisis of industrial capitalism that Ryan saw as early as 1919 but that the nation only recognized after the onset of the Great Depression. The events of this week have been compared to the Great Depression, and they are undoubtedly severe, but they are being viewed through a different ideological lens. Then, our system of government and social organization, a small “d” democratic politics and a capitalist economy, was challenged by both fascism and communism. The New Deal was enacted as a way to strengthen our system in its moment of crisis without abandoning the political and economic freedoms that we enjoyed.

But, Roosevelt and FRyan recognized that they had to save capitalism from itself. Ryan referred to the 1920s as a time of “industrial paganism” and denounced the “dictatorship” that had descended over large parts of the nation’s economy. Dom Virgil Michel, the Benedictine liturgist was equally withering in his critique of contemporary capitalism: “Capitalism degrades men to mere economic factors, to be bargained for at lowest possible market prices…workers are still treated as individuals, but not as persons, and therein lies the moral vice of capitalism.” It still lies therein.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the anticipated triumph of democratic capitalism as the only way of organizing society was almost a given. A famous book was entitled “The End of History” because it argued there was nothing left to argue about. Alas, human history has a way of defeating such lofty prognostications. Russia has returned to its autocratic ways, resembling not so much its communism heyday as its czarist past. And, now, Wall Street is in disarray and looking to what was only yesterday considered the “intrusive government regulators” for a lifeline to save itself.

It may be expecting too much of a political campaign to shape a fundamental debate on the silly ways we Americans have spoken about the economy in recent years. There has been an unarguable rule that competition is always and everywhere the best approach to a problem, not merely of the distribution of goods and services, but in education for the young and social insurance for the aged. Liberals have denounced policies that favor the rich, but they have been reluctant to advocate government regulation of the economy. John McCain and Sarah Palin have promised to “get government out of the way” and that appeals to our sense of rugged individualism.

Yesterday, on Wall Street, the great leaders of our economy were desperate for government to get in the way. Regulation ceased being a bad word. The economy, unlike a hurricane, is a human creation and can be ordered as such. Pity it took a catastrophe for such simple truisms to be given their moment in the sun.

Michael Sean Winters

Doug Kmiec On Obama's Abortion Stance

2008-09-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

For a different point of view from that expressed below by Mark Stricherz, be sure to read Doug Kmiec's article on Obama's abortion stance available on America's homepage. Doug was a reagan appointee, dean of the law school at the Catholic University of America and is a longtime pro-life advocate.

Why the Democratic Abortion Strategy is Worse

2008-09-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Gibson argued that the Democratic Party's strategy to reduce abortion is more effective than that of the GOP's:

[E]ven overturning Roe would not end abortion. It would only turn the matter back to the states, most of which are not likely to eliminate the right to abortion. Moreover, new research sponsored by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good shows that "social and economic supports for women and families dramatically reduce the number of abortions" -- a strong argument for a broad-based approach like Mr. Obama's. As Mr. Kmiec told the New York Times, "the better question is how could a Catholic not support Barack Obama?"

On its face, Gibson's claim is hard to believe: The party of NARAL, the National Abortion Federation, and NOW will reduce abortion more than the party of the National Right to Life Committee, Focus on the Family, and the Christian Coalition? It is an implausible claim -- and the closer you look at it, a false one. The GOP's abortion strategy is better -- far better.

For one thing, the Democratic Party platform continues to support the expansion of taxpayer-financed abortions. This is not idle talk. Democrats are serious about it. On President Clinton's first day in office, he issued an executive order overturning the Mexico City policy, which probihited U.S. dollars being spent on organizations that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling; the policy was not rescinded until 2001 when President Bush took office. In addition, President Clinton signed into law the expansion of funding of abortion through Medicaid. Obama has pledged to do the same things.

Government funding of abortion increases rather than decreases the abortion rate. As the study commissioned by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good points out, which Gibson failed to mention, Medicaid funding of abortion is associated with an increase in the abortion rate by one-tenth.

Granted, government can promote economic policies to reduce abortion. The CACG study notes that removing the family cap on welfare and increasing welfare funding by $1,350 per person is correlated with a 31 percent reduction in the abortion rate. Now, I don't doubt that Democrats would be far more likely than Republicans to remove the family cap, which would lower the abortion rate by 16 percent. But it is unlikely that Democrats would spend $1,350 more per peson on AFDC-TANF payments, the sum that the study's authors say is necessary to realize a 20 percent drop in the abortion rate.

For another thing, as Rick Garnett notes, national Democrats oppose any real legal protections for unborn infants. This is a key point that both Gibson and the CACG study overlook. (It is also directly contrary to Catholic social thought. As the Catechism says, “From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.”)

If Roe were overturned, dozens of states would do more than ban partial-birth abortion or enact parental consent laws; they would ban abortion in the "easy" cases -- economic and familial circumstance, psychological and emotional reasons, etc. Banning abortion in these cases would not only be possible; more than three-fifths of Americans support banning abortion in the "easy" cases. It would also be desirable; more than 90 percent of abortions are performed for those reasons.

Just consider the chart below. When abortion was illegal in all but the hard cases, abortion was rare, or relatively so. Now it's not. Indeed, the abortion rate is more than a quarter higher today than in 1973.

Number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44, by year

It is clever and counter-intuitive to argue that the Democratic Party's abortion strategy is better than the GOP's. But it is not true.

Sunday Talk Shows: News & A New Stroyline

2008-09-15T04:24:00.000-07:00

The Sunday morning news shows – NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, &c. – are not actually watched by that many people. But their power comes from two distinct sources. First, they interview people who actually make news. Second, they are watched by local news affiliates and newspaper reporters, so they shape the coverage of the news. This past weekend, they did both and in both cases it was bad news for John McCain.

The news came on ABC’s This Week when Alan Greenspan, the longtime former head of the Federal Reserve, told George Stephanopoulos that the current financial crisis was a once in a century event that was not yet done wreaking havoc on the rest of the economy. Within hours, his comments were headlining the Huffington.com website. Greenspan, rightly or wrongly, is considered an oracle on economic matters and his word cuts through the haze of conflicting economic prognostications: If Greenspan says the economy is in the tank, it really is in the tank.

In another interview this weekend, Greenspan said he did not support John McCain’s tax cuts, and watch for the Obama campaign to pick up on that quote. But, Greenspan’s views on prospective tax cuts, which were guarded, are a distraction for the Obama campaign right now. Obama needs to get the focus off of personalities and back on the economy. People who don’t give a whit about politics pay attention when Greenspan speaks on economic matters. Obama does not need to try and turn the remarks to partisan advantage: They will do that all on their own and have all the more power for their coming from an oracle. The news this morning that Lehman Brothers is filing for bankruptcy only confirms Greenspan’s grim diagnosis.

The storyline that began to surface on the roundtables was potentially more damaging for the McCain campaign. The pundits have begun to question McCain’s veracity. For a candidate who has put honor and integrity at the center of his biography, being tagged as a liar is a very real problem.

For a week, Democrats have been complaining about the untruths that were being used in GOP ads and in the stump speeches of both McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin. Her opposition to earmarks and the infamous Bridge to Nowhere were repeated long after they were proved to be exaggerations at best. The tipping point, however, was a McCain ad that attacked Obama for supporting age appropriate sex education for K-12. The ad claimed Obama supported comprehensive sex education for kindergarteners, when in fact, he supported teaching five-year olds how to avoid sexual predators, not "comprehensive" sex education.

The sex education charge seemed to have struck a nerve with the media but the serious questioning of McCain came from an unlikely source: the women on "The View." Barbara Walters and Co. were relentless in their questioning of the Arizona senator. Joy Behar was blunt: "Now we know that those two ads are untrue, they are lies. And yet, you at the end of it say you approve these messages. Do you really approve these?"http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video_log/2008/04/john_mccain_on_the_view.html
On ABC’s Sunday show, most of the twenty minutes of roundtable discussion focused on how McCain was forfeiting his reputation for decency and was waging the kind of campaign he once promised never to engage. The normally unflappable Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s Sunday host, questioned GOP analyst Tara Wall’s assertion that it was Obama not McCain who was imitating Bush. "Hold on. Obama is not about to keep the Bush tax cuts," Blitzer said with disgust in his voice. Even on Fox, GOP uber-strategist Karl Rove admitted that McCain’s ads were "beyond the 100 percent truth test."

McCain is not running his campaign of lies because he wants to. He is doing so because he has been convinced by his advisors that this is the only way to beat Obama and the Democrats. The advisors are right. With a sagging economy and an electorate tired of a long drawn out war in Iraq with no clear objective or exit strategy, the only way McCain can win is to demonize Obama and claim the mantle of change agent for himself. But, as it says in the good book, what doth it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul? In the event, with seven weeks to go and the media already unwilling to let him run a campaign of lies, McCain may lose both his soul and the election.
Michael Sean Winters

Abortion and Obama's "Catholic Problem": Another perspective

2008-09-12T13:20:00.000-07:00

In his September 11, 2008 "State of the Campaign" post, Michael Sean Winters focused on Sen. Obama's "Catholic Problem" and noted that "[b]oth parties have certain difficulties they must overcome if they are to meet with success in Catholic precincts." This is, without question, true. What he said next, though, is not - or, so reasonable and faithful Catholics could easily conclude.

Michael wrote: "The GOP has become the party of social Darwinism, their economic policies are about the survival of the fittest, and they never speak about the common good except when invoking a vague, and militaristic, brand of patriotism." Suffice it to say that many who are every bit as formed by Catholic Social Teaching and every bit as committed to the common good as Michael is will reasonably find this charge quite unfair. There is plenty in the Church's social-justice teachings to challenge both parties on matters relating to the economic order and the common good.

As for the claim that "[t]he Democrats are better than the GOP on social justice issues the church champions" - well, yes and no. To mention just one example, what about school choice? On few policy questions is Church teaching so clear: Parents have, as a matter of social justice and religious freedom, a meaningful right to send their children to a religious school. The Republicans tend to support school choice; Sen. Obama - like the teacher-unions who exercise so much power in the Democratic Party - opposes it.

Michael also wrote that the Republicans "remain the 'pro-life' party but increasingly, many pro-life voters, especially younger pro-life voters, are questioning the value of carrying the GOP's water: 35 years after Roe, what exactly does the pro-life movement have to show for its affiliation with the Republicans?"

A lot, actually. Here, the facts are stubborn. Since Roe, the Democratic Party has stood - unwaveringly, without compromise - against even the mildest regulations of the abortion license, has made the preservation of Roe's anti-democratic power-grab one of its highest priorities, and has made it clear that not only should abortion-rights be protected, they should also be funded with public monies, both here and abroad. The Republicans, on the other hand, have fought for (and won) limitations on public funding of abortions, the confirmation of Justices willing to reconsider Roe, and reasonable restrictions on abortion (like the ban on Partial Birth Abortion, parental-notice laws, 24-hour waiting periods). The "Republicans have been all talk and no action on abortion" claim is, demonstrably, false. There are hundreds of pro-life executive orders, regulations, statutes, and other actions that have been taken by Republicans, and resisted by Democrats.

Many pro-life Democrats are working to pursue policies aimed at reducing the number of abortions, even within the Roe regime. This work is commendable; pro-life Republicans should join it. (One wishes, though, that Sen. Obama would join these efforts by signing onto the Pregnant Women Support Act. So far, he has not.) But Michael's claim that Sen. Obama's approach and positions represent a departure, in the right direction, for Democrats is extremely hard to sustain.

Readers should look up, and read carefully, the so-called Freedom of Choice Act, the passage of which Sen. Obama has pledged will be among his highest priorities. This law will sweep away all pro-life legislation and other regulations of abortion, require public funding of abortion, and remove legal protections for the conscience-rights and religious-freedom of health-care providers and facilities that object to abortion. Its passage would be a breathtaking set-back for the pro-life cause, one that could not be excused by Sen. Obama's promise of more support to pregnant women.

A few days ago, on September 2, Cardinal George reminded Chicago Catholics that "one cannot favor the legal status quo on abortion and also be working for the common good." He also reminded us all that "our present laws permit unborn children to be privately killed. Laws that place unborn children outside the protection of law destroy both the children killed and the common good, which is the controlling principle of Catholic social teaching." "The unborn child," he emphasized, "who is alive and is a member of the human family, cannot defend himself or herself. Good law defends the defenseless."

Sen. Obama not only supports, but is enthusiastically and entirely committed to protecting, our "present laws" - that is, the laws that "permit unborn children to be privately killed." No doubt he would prefer that fewer abortions take place. Still, on the basic point addressed by Cardinal George, Obama's position is clear: Unborn children ought not to be protected by law; the choice for abortion ought to be legally protected; judges who would revisit Roe ought not to be confirmed.

So, back to the "Catholic problem": Catholics can, and should, find plenty in Republican positions and policies to criticize. When it comes to the fundamental human rights issue of our time, though, it should be a "problem"
not just for Catholics, but for all of us, that the Democrats remain so badly misguided.

Rick Garnett

Mark Stricherz on Catholic Bosses and Values Voters

2008-09-12T11:44:00.001-07:00

Mark Stricherz, author of Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberals and the Decline of the People's Party, sat down with me yesterday to discuss his book, and why he doesn't think Barack Obama will win the vote of "values voters." Listen to our interview here.

First-time listeners can subscribe to our podcast here.

Tim Reidy

State of the Campaign #5: Ground Game

2008-09-12T04:34:00.000-07:00

In addition to having a winning message, and a biography that allows viewers to envision you are president, and a strategy for winning 270 electoral college votes and the ability to bring Catholic swing voters into your column, you need to get your voters to the polls. You need a ground game, dedicated field workers who have organized precinct-by-precinct, know who plans to vote for you and a way of checking up on them come election day. In 2004, the GOP beat the Democrats on the ground but this year may be different.

The other day, I got a text message from the Obama campaign. Like many Americans, I signed up to be notified of Barack Obama’s vice-presidential pick by text message, and to sign up I had to give them my cell phone number. They let me know that Biden was the pick. They asked me to donate to the Red Cross when Hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana. And, then Wednesday, I got the message: “Get info on how to vote at VoteforChange.com You can get registered, apply to vote absentee or find your polling location. Fwd msg to 5 friends!”

Sarah Palin may not know what the Bush Doctrine is but everyone knows what the Obama campaign doctrine is: organize, organize, organize. The decision to hold his convention acceptance speech at a football stadium in front of 84,000, despite the logistical nightmare (creating a plan B in case of rain, filling a stadium, distributing tickets, etc.), was made because they perceived a way to sign up volunteers. There was no charge to get into Invesco Field, but you had to provide your email and cell phone and promise to volunteer. That night, the Obama campaign added 45,000 names to its volunteer rolls. It is doubtful that John Kerry had 400 volunteers in Colorado in 2004.

The downside of the long primary for the Democrats was that it kept Obama from being able to focus entirely on the Republicans and created some bitterness in the ranks. The upside was that 36 million people voted in the Democratic primaries, an all time record. There was a ton of excitement but just as important there were hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters. Since 2006, more than 2 million new Democrats have been registered in the 28 states that tag party affiliation. In that same period, Republicans have lost 344,000 voters in those states.

According to the AP, changes in voter registration are central to Democratic confidence in some key swing states. Obama lost the Pennsylvania primary to Hillary Clinton by nine points. He has struggled with the white, ethnic, Catholic voters who prove decisive in the Keystone State. Since 2006, Democrats have added 375,000 new voters in Pennsylvania while the GOP has lost 117,000. The margin of 500,000 is more than twice as large as Kerry’s 2006 margin of victory in Pennsylvania: Kerry beat Bush by 194,000 votes.

Obama had hoped that aggressive efforts to register voters in traditionally red states like George and North Carolina could turn those states purple. This week, we learned that he is pulling staff out of Georgia: McCain’s successful convention and, even more, his choice of Sarah Palin, has strengthened his candidacy among evangelicals sufficiently that Georgia now appears out of reach for the Democrats. Virginia has become a battleground, however largely because of voter registration efforts. The Old Dominion does not register by party affiliation. But of the 202,000 new voters registered since the start of the year, 64 percent are younger than 35, a demographic that Obama should win handily. Kerry did not even contest Virginia in 2004 and Bush won the state by 262,000 votes.

You never know how your ground game does until election night. The effort to organize, register and mobilize young people has been a theme for Democrats for a long time, but no one has been able to get young people to vote in numbers commensurate with their share of the electorate. The Obama camp is using new technology and new organizing tools to get young people to the polls. If the election is as close as the polls indicate, the ground game could be the difference.

Michael Sean Winters

Dems Breathe Easy As Palin Stumbles

2008-09-11T19:11:00.000-07:00

Maybe it was the nervous rash on her neck. Nah. It was the look on Sarah Palin's face, the admixture of existential fear with genuine puzzlement, when she realized she had absolutely no idea what Charlie Gibson was talking about when he asked her if she supported the "Bush doctrine." She did not even fudge her answer very well. It was one of the most embarrassing moments I have seen on television in some time. It brought two words to mind: Dan Quayle. Or, better, Lloyd Bentsen. You could almost hear his ghost saying, "Governor Palin, I knew Hillary Clinton. I worked with Hillary Clinton. Governor, you are no Hillary Clinton." A casual reader of any major newspaper could have answered that question, but not our would-be vice-president.

Being interviewed by a network news anchor is a nerve-wracking experience. During the clergy sex abuse crisis, I was interviewed by Peter Jennings of ABC News and it was the most bizarre experience of my life, even including Mardi Gras in New Orleans. You are in a room with a dozen people, none of whom give a whit about what you are going to say except the interviewer. The lighting guys and the make-up girl and the hyper-active producer and who knows who else are all running around. Jennings tried to put me at ease. "Michael," he intoned, "just pretend we are sitting down and having a cup of coffee and chatting." That did not help. Not sure about anybody else, but my mornings do not normally start with sitting down for some java with Peter Jennings. It did not help that I had a fever that day and would spend the next two days in bed with the flu.

Maybe Governor Palin should cancel all appearances tomorrow and announce that she is suffering from the flu. Sympathy is the best she can hope for here. All the way across D.C. tonight, you could hear the sound of palms slapping foreheads at McCain headquarters. And, if you listened closely, you could almost hear their muffled voices, "We should have gone with Romney."

Michael Sean Winters

State of the Campaign #4: Catholics

2008-09-11T04:34:00.001-07:00

“As Catholics go, so goes America,” religion scholar and Boston College professor Alan Wolfe recently wrote (happily, in the blurb for my book!). The quintessential swing voters for the past 35 years have been white ethnic Catholics living in suburbs in the Northeast and Midwest. They were the “Reagan Democrats” who returned to the Democratic fold to vote for Bill Clinton but who deserted one of their own, John Kerry, because he appeared more in touch with his wind-surfing board than he did with the culture of his co-religionists.

Barack Obama has a "Catholic problem." In the 2008 primaries, white, ethnic Catholics backed Hillary Clinton in the primaries, sometimes overwhelmingly. In Pennsylvania, she beat Obama 70 percent to 30 percent in the primary. The McCain campaign would not be doing its job if it had failed to notice that datum. Catholics remain a decisive voting bloc in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and New Hampshire, all swing states that are toss-ups, or barely leaning one way or the other.

This year, the Catholic swing voters in the Northeast and Midwest have been joined by a new group of swing voters, the Catholic Latinos in the Southwest. Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada are all in the toss-up column. In 2004, George W. Bush garnered 44 percent of the Latino vote nationwide, a record for a GOP candidate. Currently, the most recent polls show Obama beating McCain among Latinos 70 to 30 percent. It will be impossible for McCain to win those three states unless he does better among Latinos than 30 percent. And Florida’s Latino vote is increasingly diverse as Puerto Ricans along the I-4 Corridor in Central Florida outnumber Cuban-Americans in Miami.

How to win the Catholic vote? Both parties have certain difficulties they must overcome if they are to meet with success in Catholic precincts. The GOP has become the party of social Darwinism, their economic policies are about the survival of the fittest, and they never speak about the common good except when invoking a vague, and militaristic, brand of patriotism. They remain the “pro-life” party but increasingly, many pro-life voters, especially younger pro-life voters, are questioning the value of carrying the GOP’s water: 35 years after Roe, what exactly does the pro-life movement have to show for its affiliation with the Republicans?

The Democrats are better than the GOP on social justices the church champions, but there is still an anti-religious bias that pops out. Obama’s comment about bitter, rural voters “clinging” to religion was an example. Still, Obama has gone far to end the days when pro-choice meant pro-abortion by supporting policies aimed at preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place and providing a social safety net to women who nonetheless find themselves facing a crisis pregnancy. And, he has reached out to religiously motivated voters in ways no Democrat has before. The fact that Doug Kmiec, a long-time conservative, pro-life legal scholar and Reagan appointee, has endorsed Obama tells you that the Democrats’ changes are making a difference.

For many white, ethnic Catholics Obama’s race remains a hurdle. The neighborhoods that were disrupted by bussing in the 1970s were often ethnic Catholic neighborhoods, and the experience spawned a great deal of racial animosity. As well, McCain’s heroism during the Vietnam War struck a chord with ethnic Catholics who supported that war and resented those who opposed it. More generally, the military was the means by which many Catholic families entered the mainstream of American culture: a grandfather or uncle served in World War II or Korea or Vietnam or the first Gulf War, and that experience stamped them as finally belonging, transcending their roots, becoming Americans. There is a reason John McCain’s military biography figured more prominently than his legislative history at the GOP convention.

For Latinos, the number one issue is immigration reform. In 2006, Latinos organized massive protest rallies that were frequently addressed by Catholic prelates. The rallies were used to do political organizing as well, and in the fall elections that year, Latinos were decisive in turning out anti-immigrant GOP congressmen in several districts, including two congressional seats in McCain home state of Arizona. In Iowa and Kansas, Catholic bishops have been on the front lines protesting government immigration raids. In Rhode Island, the Bishop of Providence has written to the Homeland Security Department protesting the raids.

There was a time when John McCain favored comprehensive and humane immigration reform that would require undocumented workers to pay a fine and move to the end of the line, but nonetheless put them on a path to citizenship. But, in order to secure the Republican nomination, McCain had to abandon that position and support more draconian measures and a border-security-first approach to the issue. (Building a fence will not do much to actually solve the problem: Many undocumented workers enter the country legally on tourist visas and simply overstay their allotted time.) Latinos once considered McCain a champion, and a lonely one in the GOP. Now, he more resembles Judas. The Democrats have so far failed to fully capitalize on the McCain camp’s forfeiture of the Latino vote by embracing a family-first immigration reform agenda, although Obama did mention the need to keep families together in his acceptance speech in Denver.

So, the Catholic vote may prove decisive and it is not at all clear yet who will win it. That guarantees one thing: a fascinating race.

Michael Sean Winters

The Big Mo'

2008-09-10T21:27:00.000-07:00

In politics, as in sports, momentum, that invisible, unquantifiable, yet powerful force produced from a succession of wins can make or break a campaign. That’s why George H.W. Bush called it the “Big Mo’”. But how does a candidate gain momentum? Well, he (or she) has to figure out what the voters want in a given election, position himself as the only person who can really deliver it, and then convey that message successfully in every news cycle, by making prudent and inventive choices, advertisements, speeches etc., until voters are convinced that he really is the person that he says he is. Sounds simple, right? Well, in a certain sense, it is. But simple things are frequently the easiest things to mess up, precisely because we all can’t really believe that something so seemingly complicated could actually be so simple.

Professionals, however--those who’ve been through a few campaigns--do understand this. That’s why at the 1992 Clinton campaign headquarters, James Carville, one of Clinton’s top strategists, placed a sign on the wall that read:

Remember:
1. Change vs. more of the same.
2. The economy, stupid.
3. Don't forget health care.

This was Carville’s recipe for momentum and, with a savvy communications team who won more news cycles than they lost, as well as a little help from Ross Perot, Clinton won the 1992 election. But what’s the recipe for 2008? With a tip of the hat to Mr. Carville, here goes:

1. Change vs. more of the same
2. The economy, stupid
3. Don't forget the war.

The 2008 election is about the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but primarily it is about which candidate can really deliver change. Obama has known that from Day 1, as they say, and that’s largely why he won his party’s nomination, by consistently presenting himself as the true agent of change who can give Americans this thing they so desperately want. He has now, however, clearly lost some momentum and it may very well be because in making one of his most important choices he forgot the first and most important ingredient in the recipe. In picking Joe Biden as his running mate, Obama picked a capable, talented and knowledgeable politician. But after 35 years in Washington, D.C. and two failed presidential runs, the first one twenty years ago, Joe Biden does not really say “change.”

When Obama picked Biden, McCain saw an opportunity and seized it. What was the opportunity? To position himself as the change agent by making an unconventional choice for his running mate. That he did, and the momentum has shifted to McCain accordingly. McCain has been winning the daily news cycle everyday since the Palin announcement. The momentum can shift again, and it probably will, but there is one thing both candidates know very well: John McCain had several months to capture the momentum from Obama. Obama has just a little over 50 days.

Matt Malone, S.J.

Bishops, Biden and Abortion

2008-09-10T14:35:00.000-07:00

The Administrative Committee of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference has issued a statement on the recent comments by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senator Joseph Biden regarding the Church’s teaching on abortion. The statement is balanced but strong, as were the previous statements issued jointly by Cardinal Justin Rigali, head of the Pro-Life Committee, and Bishop William Lori, chair of the Doctrine Committee. It points out that both Pelosi and Biden misrepresented the Church’s teachings in their statements on "Meet The Press." It says that they were wrong and it says so forcefully. But, it does not get into the ugly and uncharitable business of demonizing anyone.

This is important because the bishops need to look at the two parties’ platforms and see which has the greater prospect of reducing the number of abortions. The GOP calls for overturning Roe which would punt the issue back to the states. Most states would codify Roe, perhaps with greater restrictions on late-term abortions, but most abortions do not occur late in the term and most abortions do not occur in the more conservative states that would enact restrictions. The GOP specifically declined to endorse a common ground approach to reducing the number of abortions. They removed the following line from their platform: "We invite all persons of good will, whether across the political aisle or within our party, to work together to reduce the incidence of abortion." Why did they remove those words?

The Democrats did add that language, and pledged support for efforts to provide pre- and post-natal care for pregnant women, to achieve universal health insurance so that women can afford to go to a hospital, and other programs that would make it easier for women to make the choice to carry a child to term. Let’s be honest: Most abortions in America are procured by women who do not think they can afford a pregnancy. The Democrats, while not backing down on their support for Roe, embrace a program that shows greater promise of actually reducing the number of abortions. I think they are wrong about Roe and I want our bishops to call them out on that fact. But, the bishops cannot say any longer that one party is pro-life and the other is pro-abortion.

There is one problem with the bishops’ statement. They want to show that this issue is not strictly speaking confessional in nature, that it is not dependent upon revealed religion but, instead, is based on natural law. In fact, as Rocco Palmo reports, the bishops changed some of the language of the text to show that their argument is not based on Church teaching. But, not everyone in America believes in natural law theory, so while I understand that the bishops do not want abortion to be seen as a "Catholic issue" I think they have to be better prepared for a different kind of argument, and one they must conduct without recourse to their apostolic authority, if they pursue the natural law argument.

For example, the bishops’ statement reads: "The first is a biological question: When does a new human life begin? When is there a new living organism of the human species, distinct from mother and father and ready to develop and mature if given a nurturing environment? While ancient thinkers had little verifiable knowledge to help them answer this question, today embryology textbooks confirm that a new human life begins at conception. The Catholic Church does not teach this as a matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact."

Yes, those embryology textbooks will show that human life is present from conception onwards. The zygote or colony of cells is undeniably alive and not dead. And, it is undeniably human – it is not an acorn and will not grow into an oak tree. But, it is not yet an individual human person because twinning is possible up until day fifteen or sixteen after conception. Should the zygote deserve legal protection before it is an individual human person? I believe so, and the bishops believe so, but there is no scientific argument one way or the other, and the American constitutional tradition only recognizes the existence of rights that inhere in individuals. Besides, NARAL and NOW can hire scientists too, so I do not think the bishops have found a winning argument.

I have never been a fan of natural law reasoning, and an argument based upon it certainly robs the bishops of their authority when they speak to Pelosi and Biden as pastors: as Cardinal William Levada demonstrated in his doctoral dissertation, a natural law argument cannot, by definition, be issued on the authority of the Church’s magisterium because it is not contingent upon revealed truth. Aristotle was not a Thomist although Thomists are Aristotelians.

The bishops argument would be more persuasive to my Catholics ears if they invoked the Imago Dei. No matter how many scientists NARAL finds, none of them can dispute the truths about the human person that we find in Genesis and the Psalms and in the Incarnation of our Lord. Those truths changed the world. Abortion is violence against a child of God, or children of God, it doesn’t matter if it is day one or day twenty after conception. Until the bishops appear more in love with their fellow men, especially those who err, they will fail to create the culture of life which is the only way to end the evil of abortion.

Michael Sean Winters

Welcome Tom Rosshirt

2008-09-10T11:56:00.001-07:00

America's election blog is pleased to welcome Tom Rosshirt as a contributor. His first post is below. Tom was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and is a partner at West Wing Writers, a communications and strategy firm located in Washington, D.C. He and his family worship at Holy Trinity Church in Washington, D.C.