{"id":15410,"date":"2008-05-02T13:45:21","date_gmt":"2008-05-02T17:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15410.html"},"modified":"2008-05-02T13:45:21","modified_gmt":"2008-05-02T17:45:21","slug":"why-do-catholics-prefer-clinton-to-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/why-do-catholics-prefer-clinton-to-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do Catholics prefer Clinton to Obama?"},"content":{"rendered":"

At first blush, there’s no obvious reason to explain why Barack Obama is, according to exit polls, struggling with Catholic voters. He’s opposed the war in Iraq; he’s presented an ambitious plan to combat global warming; he’s taken a progressive attitude on capital punishment and immigration, emphasizes “social justice,” and while he’s pro-choice, Obama has talked at some length about the kind of policies that could reduce the number of abortions. Pepperdine’s Doug Kmiec, a conservative Catholic, endorsed Obama in February, saying he’s a “natural<\/a>” for the Catholic vote.<\/p>\n

Except, it clearly hasn’t worked out that way. The white Catholic vote has been backing Hillary Clinton strongly and fairly consistently<\/a>: “[Clinton] has won the group by double-digits in 16 of the 22 states where data were available. In Pennsylvania, Clinton won 70 percent of all Catholics.” The margin was even more one-sided among white Catholic voters who attend mass at least once a week.<\/p>\n

If Obama’s a “natural” for the Catholic vote, why is Clinton beating him so easily among Catholic voters? Melinda Henneberger explored the issue in an interesting piece<\/a> for Slate.<\/p>\n

A priest I know in central Pennsylvania, the Rev. John Chaplin, sees race as an issue. “At my little church, some of what I heard was racial, and some of it was people believing that stuff about Obama being a Muslim,” said Chaplin. Parishioners seemed to find video clips of Obama’s former preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, particularly shocking in contrast to the formality of the Catholic Mass and our high-church fondness for services so decorous that one really needn’t exchange a word with another soul. (“We don’t carry on like that in our church” is how one woman in Chaplin’s diocese, the 67-year-old wife of a retired cop, described her reaction to Wright to me.) <\/p>\n

“You know that Catholic thing about propriety,” Chaplin said, “that you penalize people for speaking out and never penalize them for keeping quiet? That’s part of it, and the Catholic notion of patriotism, which is heavily nationalistic, hurts him, too. This isn’t a group predisposed to voting for Hillary — when she can get the votes away from you, you know people have got it in for you — because this is not a hotbed of feminism. But the racial thing was already there….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, so there’s some racial animus driving the Catholic vote away from Obama. But there has to be more to it, right?
\n
\nI would assume so, but Henneberger didn’t seem to find much else. She noted that Clinton, at least rhetorically, has been slightly less supportive of abortion rights — she said a few years ago that every abortion is a tragedy — but it’s unlikely that has made too big a difference. After all, most U.S. Catholics disagree<\/a> with the church about reproductive rights (and the number goes up<\/a> among U.S. Catholics who identify themselves as Democrats.)<\/p>\n

Henneberger also had this outside-the-box theory:<\/p>\n

Though Saturday Night Live wouldn’t seem to be in the vanguard of Catholic thought, Tina Fey may have been onto something with her “Bitch Is the New Black” comparison of Hillary to a cranky but proficient old nun: “Bitches get stuff done; that’s why Catholic schools use nuns as teachers and not priests. They’re mean … and they sleep on cots, and they’re allowed to hit you. And at the end of the school year, you hated those bitches. But you knew the capitol of Vermont.” <\/p>\n

The ’04 Casey voter says nun-run Catholic schools turned out a lot of good feminists: “Older Catholics with exposure to nuns in school may be more comfortable with women in positions of authority.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t find this is especially compelling.<\/p>\n

But what else is there? Why is<\/i> Obama struggling to connect with Catholic voters? Race certainly has something<\/i> to do with it, but is that the only factor? And if so, would racial animus drive Catholics to McCain in November?<\/p>\n

I’m just throwing this out there for some discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At first blush, there’s no obvious reason to explain why Barack Obama is, according to exit polls, struggling with Catholic voters. He’s opposed the war in Iraq; he’s presented an ambitious plan to combat global warming; he’s taken a progressive attitude on capital punishment and immigration, emphasizes “social justice,” and while he’s pro-choice, Obama has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}