Time has an interesting article about how Obama is attracting many Catholics who have voted Republican in the past:
Douglas Kmiec is the kind of Catholic voter the G.O.P. usually doesn’t have to think twice about. The Pepperdine law professor and former Reagan Justice Department lawyer (Samuel Alito was an office mate) attends Mass each morning. He has actively opposed abortion for most of his adult life, working with crisis pregnancy centers to persuade women not to undergo the procedure. He is a member of the conservative Federalist Society and occasionally sends a contribution to Focus on the Family.
He is also a vocal supporter of Barack Obama. Kmiec made waves in the Catholic world in late March when he endorsed the Democratic candidate. But Kmiec insists that while he still considers himself a Republican, his choice is clear this election year. “I have grave moral doubts about the war, serious doubts about the economic course Republicans have followed over the last seven years, and believe that immigration reforms won’t come about by Republican hands,” he says. “Senator McCain would not be the strongest advocate for the balance of things that I care about.”
A new TIME poll of Catholic voters reveals that Kmiec is part of a broader pattern. Although Obama was thought to have a “Catholic problem” during the Democratic primaries, in which Hillary Clinton won a majority of Catholic votes, he has pulled even with John McCain among that constituency — Obama now polls 44% to his G.O.P. opponent’s 45%.
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Many conservative Catholics consider abortion to be the determining factor in their electoral decisions, and as a result they almost always support Republican candidates. But for other Catholics, social issues can be trumped in times of economic and national insecurity. What’s interesting about this year is that Catholics like Kmiec are moving from the first group of voters to the second.
Republicans entered this election season from a position of disadvantage with Catholics for the same reasons they face problems with the general electorate: the economy, high gas prices and the ongoing war in Iraq. But they’ve also failed to embrace the model of Catholic engagement that Bush spent six years putting into place. The Obama campaign is taking advantage of that opportunity. Just as Ronald Reagan brought large numbers of Catholic Democrats into the G.O.P. in the 1980s, Obama is hoping to woo them back and create a new Catholic category: Obama Republicans.
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In a climate in which Catholics aren’t voting based on a rather narrow ideological agenda, the mechanics of how campaigns court them become more important. And it’s on that level that perhaps the biggest changes from 2004 can be seen. McCain has a team of Catholic politicians, including Sam Brownback and Frank Keating, who serve as his surrogates, but has few aides within the campaign to coordinate outreach. The lack of high-level religious advisers became obvious earlier this year when McCain accepted the endorsement of Evangelical pastor John Hagee, who has called the Catholic Church “the great whore of Babylon,” a phrase unlikely to warm the hearts of McCain’s Catholic supporters.
Obama’s campaign more closely resembles the 2004 Bush outreach effort. An extensive religious outreach team has focused the bulk of its work on training ordinary Catholics to reach out to friends and neighbors by holding “values” house parties and explaining their support for Obama. The Democrat also has a roster of high-powered Catholic surrogates who have fanned out across swing states — including Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey Jr., whose father, the pro-life former governor, was widely viewed by Catholics as a victim of Democratic intolerance after he was not allowed to speak at the party’s 1992 convention.
Obama, whose work as a community organizer was partly funded by a Catholic social-justice group, recently laid out his plan for a new and improved faith-based initiative. It is a policy extension of the phrase he often uses — “I am my brother’s keeper” — to express his belief that members of a society are responsible for one another. And it is an idea rooted in the Catholic concept of the common good.
Read it all here.