THE NATION'S PULSE: Winter Dreams
Stricherz, Mark
THE NATION'S PULSE MARK STRICHERZ Winter Dreams Why Catholics aren't yet part of the Republican base T N EARLY FEBRUARY, former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn was organizing a citywide rally against...
...Said the president, Father Frank Pavone, "A lot of [Christian voters] are staying home...
...bishops, following the lead of the Vatican, published an eloquent document called "Living the Gospel of Life...
...The founder of Your Catholic Voice is Michael Galloway, a compelling if eccentric 49-year-old software entrepreneur based in Bakersfield, California...
...Bush won among white Catholics by a 53-47 margin, according to the University ofAkron's quadrennial survey of religion and politics...
...Instead, he found, their chief goal now was "social renewal," trying to replace our frequently 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2004 hedonistic national culture with a Judeo-Christian one...
...Figures from the National Election Study, which use the more liberal indicator of self-identification, are four to five percentage points higher...
...To be sure, Republicans, especially Rove, will keep trying to woo Catholic voters...
...Although consistently pro-life, Bush, like his Republican predecessors, has never appeared at the annual March for Life...
...Last April Kerry, a self-proclaimed Catholic, said that his litmus test for appointing a justice to the Supreme Court would be that he or she support legal abortion...
...Despite great potential, Your Catholic Voice is short on experience...
...These [voters] are real strong traditional Catholicspro-family and pro-life...
...We have the greatest distribution system in the world: the Catholic parish...
...The strategy in 2000 appears to have worked...
...Called "Citizenship Sundays," the program involves registering voters after Mass at hundreds of parishes...
...And (at the time) neither did President Bush...
...The focus has been sharpened—to elect pro-life candidates of whichever party...
...We're Catholic, period...
...Wagner found that in the 1990s active Catholics trended Republican...
...I'm sorry...
...John Kerry on whether or not he supported a state constitutional amendment, thus putting Kerry in a political bind...
...We will have the largest Catholic rally in the city on Sunday," said Flynn, who during President Clinton's first term was the U.S...
...Mark Stricherz, a Phillips Foundation Fellow, is writing a book about the McGovern-Fraser commission (196972) and how it transformed the Democratic Party...
...On the one hand, an estimated 2,000 people showed up in the cold and on short notice...
...They're not engaged and unlikely to marry anytime soon...
...At the time Flynn wasn't predicting just that the event would draw huge crowds...
...The reason, Wagner argued, was their waning concern for economic justice...
...The group's operating budget this year is $7 million...
...ambassador to the Vatican...
...There's more financial backing—$5 million will be spent this year...
...Under the plan parish priests will remind Mass-goers not only about the importance of voting but making abortion their top priority...
...There's more paid staff (25) and members (200,000...
...Gay marriage is going to be legal in some states...
...But they should also know that their relationship has really only begun, in the manner of a couple who just started dating...
...By 2000 Rove had weaved this theme into Bush's candidacy, the chief example of which perhaps has been his support for "compassionate conservatism...
...And the organization possesses an extensive database called MySQL, which has the party affiliation, district, and precinct information of 165 million voters in the country...
...THE NEWEST AND POTENTIALLY MOST IMPORTANT is Flynn's organization, Your Catholic Voice...
...He predicted it would draw huge crowds of Catholics...
...For example, Galloway said the organization's goal this year is to identify eight-to-ten million Catholics and register two-to-three million of them...
...Rove has long sought to make active Catholics part of the GOP...
...When I called for an interview, he picked up the phone and, without so much as an introduction, spoke for eight minutes uninterrupted, managing to sound by turns like Pope John Paul II, Steve Jobs, and Stephen Daedulus...
...Indeed, two relatively new Catholic grassroots organizations have adopted this as their goal...
...Already the organization has registered voters on three different dates...
...He seems to have first come up with it after reading a November 1998 story, "The Catholic Vote in America," by pollster Steven Wagner in Crisis magazine (of which I am a contributing editor...
...This group is the largest group of Catholics, representing 16 percent, or 17 million voters, of the 2000 electorate...
...The other assist has come from the Roman Catholic hierarchy...
...Take its approach to abortion...
...Since then Rove's pursuit of Catholic voters has received two big assists...
...He won among traditionalists 61-39 and centrists 55-45...
...For example, Pavone said his ads are likely to run in media-markets throughout the country "It's more in line with our ministry" he notes...
...Although released five years ago, the document has really only been cited by church officials since January of 2003, the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade...
...We have abortion legal in all 50 states...
...Both groups fit the Wagner pattern of frequent Mass attendance and support for cultural conservatism, according to Lyman Kellstedt, an emeritus professor at Wheaton College in Illinois...
...Since denying pro-life Pennsylvania Gov...
...there's just Catholics who vote," Galloway says...
...Though Bush lost among all Catholic voters 49-47, he carried two of the three subsets of white Catholics...
...We have to...see that we're not Republican or Democratic, Independent or whatever...
...The other main Catholic grassroots group, Priests for Life, is more realistic...
...This will be the very first time that Catholics have been involved politically....Our message is, Let the people decide...
...What's more, Flynn vowed to "pin down" Sen...
...But Priests for Life isn't the second coming of the O'Connell or Daley machines either...
...In late 1998, the U.S...
...We're kind of like McDonald's...
...It more or less said what church officials should have for decades: that abortion is a "preeminent threat to human dignity" and that banning it therefore should be considered a higher goal even than seeking to eradicate poverty...
...Of course, the Bush administration has not attached central importance to Catholic concerns, either...
...THE NATION'S PULSE MARK STRICHERZ Winter Dreams Why Catholics aren't yet part of the Republican base T N EARLY FEBRUARY, former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn was organizing a citywide rally against homosexual marriage...
...As Flynn points out, "You have to have a select effort in the key electoral states" (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri...
...There's no such thing as the Catholic vote...
...Rove surely once had more romantic dreams about Catholics and Republicans coming together...
...And it plans to do four more before November, as well as run TV and print ads starting in July...
...We're going to change that, because religious conservatives have lost the culture wars...
...To get a sense of how farfetched Galloway's goal is, consider that the Republican National Committee this year aims to register three million voters...
...On the other hand, Kerry took no position on the amendment...
...Nor has he sought to overturn the FDA's October 2000 decision to approve RU-486...
...Created last June, the group is superior to its predecessor, the Catholic Alliance, which had been founded in 1995 and disbanded last year...
...As a result, the event seemed to confirm some of Flynn's earlier suspicions about the GOP: "If Republicans were serious, they would have been mobilizing Catholic voters four years ago...
...But the actual rally of February 8 was something of a mixed bag...
...Robert Casey a speaking slot at the 1992 convention, the party often seems to go out of its way to offend observant Catholics...
...Seventy percent of black children are born out of wedlock...
...By November it will have spent $10 million on its voter registration and education efforts...
...One has been from the Democratic Party...
...Sounds good, if only it did not suspend all the known laws of American politics...
...We are the epitome of the grassroots...
...As a result, Catholic pro-lifers can now plausibly claim that the number one priority of their brethren is to elect pro-life candidates...
...I have noticed that in the Catholic and Evangelical world there is a false understanding of Christianity...a kind of separatist philosophy" What's more, Priests for Life cannot be confused with Little Sisters of the Poor...
...Both obviously have been done so as not to alienate, among others, mainline Protestant voters, who tend to vote Republican and support legal abortion...
...Flynn was referring to a proposed amendment to the Massachusetts constitution that would ban gay nuptials, and you can be sure that Karl Rove was following the rally with interest...
...Perhaps, but those ads would be most effective elsewhere...
...It plans to register 115,000 Catholic voters by November...
Vol. 37 • April 2004 • No. 3
