Story summary:
Barack Obama has a Catholic problem. He doesn't need to take drastic action to make up for this deficit. He doesn't need to bring a Catholic priest into his "brain trust" like FDR did in 1932, and he doesn't need to win overwhelmingly among Catholics like John F. Kennedy did in 1960. But here's the interesting part: In articulating his economic views in ways that are especially accessible to Catholics, Obama would do much more than just increase his chances with that constituency. He'd discover that Catholic social thought provides Democrats with the kind of moral vision and linguistic clarity that their economic positions have lacked for decades now.
Barack Obama has a Catholic problem. While Catholics constitute only 23 percent of the nation's population, their numbers are higher in such critical states as Nevada, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. And he lost badly among those voters this winter and spring. In New Hampshire, at the beginning of the primary season, Hillary Clinton took 44 percent of the Catholic vote to Obama's 27 percent. Toward the end of the primary season, in Pennsylvania, Clinton won 70 percent of the Catholic vote to Obama's 30. Pundits and pollsters have mostly focused on other demographic characteristics among Clinton's supporters: They were older, less educated, and earned less than $50,000. There is undoubtedly a great deal of overlap. But Obama consistently ran better among Protestants than he did among Catholics.
Obama doesn't need to take drastic action to make up for this deficit. He doesn't need to bring a Catholic priest into his "brain trust" like FDR did in 1932, and he doesn't need to win overwhelmingly among Catholics like John F. Kennedy did in 1960. But here's the interesting part: In articulating his economic views in ways that are especially accessible to Catholics, Obama would do much more than just increase his chances with that constituency. He'd discover that Catholic social thought provides Democrats with the kind of moral vision and linguistic clarity that their economic positions have lacked for decades now.
In early July, the Obama campaign had itself a "values week." It was a big to-do. The candidate called for extending Bush's faith-based initiatives. He gave a beautiful testimony about his own conversion experience and spoke movingly about how he "let Jesus Christ into my life." Obama has always littered his rhetoric with quotes from Scripture, and he did so even more a few weeks ago. He even allowed that "war and poverty, joblessness and homelessness, violent streets and crumbling schools--are not simply technical problems ... they are moral problems." But the overall impression of the week was that a ticket was being punched, a check mark put next to the words "values voters" on the campaign checklist. The question is whether he will mention values not just on specifically designated occasions during "values week", but if he'll demonstrate how his values ground his economic and other policies. So far he hasn't.
He could start by borrowing from Catholic social thought, which rests on two foundations: the inalienable dignity of the human person and the common good. Human dignity, though recently derided in TNR, has both a religious and a liberal pedigree. For Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it is rooted in the belief that man is created in the image and likeness of God. Modern liberals embrace the notion in different ways, but particularly espouse Kant's argument that a human being is never a means but always an end. In the American context, Lincoln said it best: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."
Human dignity's necessary social corollary is the common good. Not only are we all essentially equal; we are all in this together. The common good embraces the idea that property rights are not absolute and that the good of everyone in a society has a claim on each of us within that society. In the 2004 convention keynote that first catapulted Obama to national attention, he referenced a biblical injunction that speaks to the same core idea: "Alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we're all connected as one people. ... I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper."