Bush's Catholic Outreach Director Assesses Obama's Catholic Outreach (Calls it dishonest)

Because Deal Hudson was director of Catholic outreach for George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, I was interested in hearing his take on the Obama administration's Catholic outreach for my God & Country column in tomorrow's U.S. News Weekly.

Hudson thinks Obama's "common ground" talk on abortion is disingenuous—the president has rolled back the ban on federal funding for abortion providers abroad, supports rescinding the federal ban on government-funded abortion in the District of Columbia, and hasn't ruled out covering abortion through healthcare reform—but is nonetheless impressed by the administration's ongoing Catholic PR blitz.

And Hudson is disturbed by the GOP's silence on the same front. "What is it that the Republicans have offered Catholics to rally behind that can compete with Obama's meeting the Holy Father or even the Notre Dame speech?" Hudson asks. "Nothing."

You accompanied President Bush on his first meeting with Pope John Paul II in 2001. How did you think President Obama's first meeting with Pope Benedict XVI went?

It was misleading of the president to speak to the Holy Father about committing to abortion reduction when he knew the healthcare bill would include funding for abortion services and when he was on the record for supporting federal funding for abortions in the District of Columbia. I think those two things taken together will make his promise to the Holy Father a political mistake that will come back to haunt him when it's held up to scrutiny down the road.

If you focus just on the event and immediately afterward, it was a good day for Obama. He got what he wanted: a silent pope and an affable greeting and positive stories coming out about the warm conversation in a 30-plus-minute meeting.

From the Vatican side, there was an attempt, albeit not in your face, to control the spin on the meeting in two ways. First, the pope surprised Obama by handing him the bioethics document on human dignity, whose opening line is: "Human life should be respected from the moment of conception until death." And the Vatican press secretary stressed that life issues were discussed first and foremost with the president, and at length. The Vatican did what it needed to do without being hard-edged, which the White House seemed to accept graciously. So I don't think the White House overplayed its hand on the discussion.

Obama has made many overtures to the Catholic community, from sitting down with Catholic reporters before meeting with the pope to appointing a well-respected Catholic to be his surgeon general. Has such Catholic outreach become standard operating procedure for presidential administrations?

Bush did them, but you can't call them standard operating procedure. It's very smart for Obama to actually take the advice of his Catholic outreach team. They have done a good job navigating the challenges they face among Catholics over their policy positions. If you take some of their Catholic nominations, they seem to have a common thread. Sonia Sotomayor and/or surgeon general nominee Regina Benjamin—they are presented as Catholics, but the part of their story that the White House highlights is something that is compelling from another direction.

The administration knows in both cases that, once the Catholic issues are explored, there are going to be problems [because of the nominees' liberal positions]. But in both cases, they know they can be offset. In the case of the surgeon general, it was her rebuilding of a clinic to help the poor. That's something very appealing to Catholics.

And they know Catholics are very sensitive on Sotomayor to the struggle of a minority woman to navigate the byways of a male-dominated establishment. They have thought carefully about how they are going to offset the expected criticism of these pro-choice Catholic nominees by having stories ready that they know will appeal to Catholics and blunt criticism from the pro-life side.

When we spoke in March, you were disappointed by the Republican Party's anemic Catholic outreach effort. What's your current assessment?

There is not a unified message there. You take the case of the Sotomayor hearings. That would have been a great opportunity for the Republicans to pull together religious conservatives into a coalition. But there was a lack of intensity in their opposition.

I opposed the Republicans' anti-immigration crusade in 2005. It was a huge mistake. We'd gotten 44 percent of Hispanics in 2004, and I saw that all wash away in a number of months in 2005. So the Republicans are ignoring the fact that we have a very bad Supreme Court nominee on our hands because she's Hispanic. It's like we blew the immigration debate, so we're giving this nominee a pass. The Republican Party just hasn't done anything to reunite the religious conservative base and reanimate Catholic supporters.

What is it that the Republicans have offered Catholics to rally behind that can compete with Obama's meeting the Holy Father or even the Notre Dame speech? Nothing. The one chance they had was the Sotomayor hearings, and the best we heard was from some evangelical senators. The Catholic leadership of the Republican Party is laying low, with the exception of [New Jersey Congressman] Chris Smith.

You directed Catholic outreach for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign and faced a Catholic nominee in John Kerry. How did his Catholic outreach compare with Obama's?

The contrast between Kerry's Catholic outreach and Obama's is night and day. We know that Kerry's inner circle did not take the advice they were getting from their Catholic advisers. There have been Catholic Democrats who've worked for Democratic presidential elections going back four or five elections. And they had this attitude that all American Catholics were post-Vatican II Catholics, that we know what the Vatican thinks but we know that American Catholics believe something else, and we're going to appeal to that something else. It was an undertone of we're on the side of the dissenters.

But between 2004 and 2008, a younger group of advisers like [Obama campaign Catholic outreach director] Mark Linton and [Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good co-founder] Alexia Kelley emerged. They realized that the kind of Catholics who'd voted for Bush were not the kind of Catholics who are moved by invocations of American dissent on contraception, reminders of the sex abuse scandal, and this whole plethora of smart-alecky talk about the Catholic Church in America.

Bush got the Catholic vote by showing respect for the Catholic Church and its leadership and some basic issues of importance to Catholics. And so Obama's advisers packaged him as someone who is going to do what he can to seek the same ends politically that the church wants the government to seek. It's an attitude that we know what the Vatican thinks, and we're going to go as far as we can with that. It's an undertone of respect.

The Obama White House is expected to unveil what it is calling a "common ground" approach to abortion and other reproductive health issues in coming weeks. What are your expectations for it?

Every time the Obama team has planned some sort of initiative on his behalf, it has come off pretty well. The exception would be the Notre Dame speech, which cost him. One thing we learned through the Catholic Voter Project at Crisis [a Catholic magazine Hudson published] is that Catholics don't like a lot of confrontational and aggressive speechmaking in politics. They like messages like "common ground" and "partial agreement" and "working together" and "nonpartisan."

They don't like the old evangelical, more stringent-type message. Actually, common ground has its own resonance with the official Catholic community because it comes from Cardinal [Joseph] Bernardin. So the plan is going to be one more finger in the dike of the eventual realization that the president misled the Holy Father. The policy itself is the funding of abortion, the appointment of pro-choice Catholics, and the repealing of the Mexico City policy, and that's the narrative people need to pay attention to.

Now, believe it or now, aside from the childish isults ("you really don’t seem to know much about this subject), which have been demonstrated invalid in this very thread, I give you the benefit of the doubt.

Darn, sorry, I confused you with someone else that did seem sketchy on the stats. I answered your post with out getting back on the thread and re familiarizing myself with who was who, but you are giving me the religion purity lecture again and I don't care to hear it.

My interest is in discussing politics and voting not the purity of each category, do you think the Mormons or the Protestants are perfectly represented, no, but it is good enough for us to work with in politics.

I did correct you about your 88% claim for practicing Catholics when I posted this.

"Even you must agree that breaking the Catholic vote down to being ‘a white Catholic and attending church at least once a week’ is close enough to your definition of “Catholic”, that group was the most conservative of the Catholics, voting 62% republican in 2008, not the 88% that you thought."

Here is the chart for the 2008 election, see if you can satisfy yourself with it.

Your mistake here is that you think we are having a debate of some sort, and I’m just trying to make sure you’re straight on the facts so you don’t make the same mistake in the future. Case and point: You keep returning to the poll somebody had where 62% of white Catholics who go to Church voted Republican. You do this because you are looking to salvage at least one point, and because you want to ignore your original point that a majority of Catholics voted for Obama (which is still just as asinine). Now, Catholicism itself has never defined itself along racial lines, but even if it did, being white and going to Church even on a daily basis would not make someone a Catholic. And there are plenty of people who say they go weekly (because they are supposed to) but don’t actually do it. This is yet another example of how little you know about Catholicism. Meanwhile, there are people who do go weekly, but refuse to accept the sanctity of life. More than you might think actually. The Church is very clear about this: If you do not accept the sanctity of life, it doesn’t matter how fervently you do everything else. That being said, I’ll concede the 62% versus 88%. I have no doubt that the number is a lot closer to 88%, but its irrelevant. Your original point was that a MAJORITY of Catholics voted for Obama, because you and the pollster you listened to had no idea what makes someone a Catholic. This has nothing to do with religion or purity. I’m trying to help you get you facts straigt now and in the future. And I’ll let the Mormons and the Protestants correct you when you make similiar mistakes about them. I’ll stay out of it, because I’m not that interested, and because I keep my mouth shut when I’m clueless about a subject. To repeat: I don’t want to fight with you. You said something dumb, and I corrected you. Now I’m trying to help you so that you don’t make the same mistake in the future. If you must continue fighting about this for the next two weeks, you’ll never be even a little less wrong.

Because they are the best data on the Catholic vote. “We” never “established” anything.

No, they are the best data on what the pollsters have identified as the Catholic vote. The figures are always invaild because some respondents incorrectly indentify themselves as such. "We" don't need to estiblish anything, because the Vatican has already been quite clear about who gets to call himself a Catholic. I went to the trouble of giving you the necessary information so you could make this qualification yourself. I was being polite when I used the pronoun "we" because I assumed you were at least smart enough to grasp this very simple concept. I'll be sure not to do that in the future. The pollsters incorrectly identify Catholics for the usual three reasons: Ignorance, stupidity, or a bias against Capitalism. Either way, you're on their side. Pick a motive.

I think you need to take your religious discussion over to the religion section where you can complain about how polling Catholics, smears Catholics.

Sorry, but this is my thread, appropriately started in news. The conversation you and I are having is maybe 80% about politics and 20% about religion. The two do overlap every now and then. It is specifically about me correcting invalid polling figures you posted. I let you know how the methodology was flawed. You got defensive. I had to be more specific to substantiate my charge. I have done the same thing in the past when, for example, someone posted that the the majority of the people who died in the WTC voted for Gore, becuase I had some familiarity with that sample too, having worked there until 2001. I have zero interest in discussing religion with you, because I don't really care to know about your relgion, and you have established your ignorance about Catholicism. You probably never learn about things like these, because when you're wrong, you hate to know about it. When someone comes on a thread I started, and starts spreading lies like "a majority of Catholics voted for Obama," he gets called one in. When someone tells you you're wrong, you dig in and fight, in the face of overwhelming evidence. I bet it sucks to go through life that way.

What is it with guys like you that you're so afraid to admit you're wrong you'd rather just ignore the pile of evidence someone with more knoledge of the subject provided for you? Do you enjoy looking stupid and wasting my time simultaneously? Is that it? Again: Catholicism is not an ethnicity. It is not a race. It is not a state of mind. It is a religion. You are only a member of a religion if you practice it. If you agree with every single thing a particular religion has to say, but choose not to practice it, you may still be a fine person, but you are not a member of that religion. If you practice a religion, but that gets to be too much work for you, you can still call yourself a "Lapsed Zorastorian," but you are no longer an active memeber of that religion. If a pollster comes up to you looking for Zorastrian opinions on dead gay mustached glam-rock lead singers, you would be being dishonest if you gave him yours. You're no longer practicing that religion. If the pollster was aware of this, but included your response anyway, he'd be dishonest too.

Liberals are constantly pushing the idea that "Catholic" is something you call yourself. They hate Catholicism anyway, and they are all about self-identification. That's how a guy can take some hormone injects, get his nuts cut off and make everyone else call him a woman.

So, to reapeat: Popes don't usually get to decide who is or who is not a Catholic. There are fairly simple instructions for practicing the religion. Those who fail to do so are can call themselves Rumplestilskin in they like, but they are not Catholic. Any poll that fails to take this into account is meaningless. If you have pointed out, such polls do exist. Therefore, the polls that fail to do so are a waste of everyone's time. Please take so time to think about all of this rather than ignoring it an responding with yet another version of the same incorrect point you made in your original post.

Sorry but your being obsessed with Catholic issues does not help us know what the Catholic voters are doing, these polls do, it is the same with the Jewish vote and the Protestant vote, these polls give us the information we need.

When we try to learn to how Muslims are voting it isn’t helpful to get Muslims telling us to ignore all the voting information we are using because those Muslims are not measured for purity, especially if the results disagree with the Muslim that is telling us that.

A couple of our Orthodox Jews make the same useless argument as you do, Protestants generally will make a remark resembling your point but they do not get so offended that they try to discard polling as you do.

When Catholics vote liberal and Protestants vote conservative, there is something that needs to be studied there.

I don’t mind so much that you are a broken record, but it id annoying that you keep repeating the same lies. No one who knows me has ever suggested that I am “obsessed with Catholic issues.” Or even devoutly religious for that matter. I am a run of the mill Catholic, nothing more. I don’t go to daily Mass, and I don’t make of habit of the Rosary.

The problem that you continue to intentionally have is that you refuse to recognize the difference between what someone calls himself, and what someone actually is. If I wanted to, I could respond to a poll that, “Yes I am Muslim, and, yes, I love Isreal.” Then I’d be lying, and then the poll would be invalid. And any pollster who knowingly used my responses would be just as dishonest. We’ve already had this EXCACT conversation, so I have no idea what your point is in going to it again with the variable changed.

Part of the difference with a religious group like Muslims, of course, may be the media’s reluctance to sound racist and poll Arabs or Persians or Indonesians. I have no doubt that there are people who consider themselves Muslim for political purposes without having visited a mosque in years. With Catholics however, attendence at Mass where (warning: religious content) a miracle occurs transforming bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ is central to the faith. If you are taking the Body of Christ into you, you’re not Catholic. So, if you’re not going to Mass, you’re not Catholic. If you don’t believe these things, how can you be Catholic, or call yourself Catholic? You can’t. You can call yourself a Catholic if you like, but you might just as well call yourself a Muslim or a Baptist. Calling yourself a Jew is a different story, because Judiasm is both a ethnicity and a religion. There are untold numbers of Jews who practice other religions than Judiasm. They are still Jews. And, since you brought it up, I’m not offended. I am going out of my way to correct your ignorance, nothing more.

A Protestant, BTW, is by definition any Christian who does not practice Catholicism. That would include people who don’t go to Church yet call themselves “Catholic.” Henry VII was a Catholic who made a few of his own rules but accepted the general Catholic theology. The Catholic Church teaches that there is nothing evil about Protestantism. It’s just a more difficult route into Heaven. Nothing more.

Let’s sum up, so we don’t have to do this a tenth time. You don’t know what a Catholic is. I explain it to you thoroughly. You get offended because you don’t like talking about religion. You repeat the same incorrect point. Give it a rest if you have nothing original to say. You’re still just as wrong.

For the tenth time I am not interested in your religious views, I will continue to use polling data as it relates to religious groups.

OK, then for the tenth time, I'm only interested in supplying religious fact as it relates to the discussion we are having. A person is a member of a religious group when he accepts the beliefs of that group and he participates in the faith's community and practices. A person who strays from a faith ceases to be a member, though it may comfort him to still think of himself as a part of one. The same thing would happen if you were once on a recreational team, but then stopped going for a couple of years. You might like to think of yourself as a member of that team, but nobody else does, even if you were once the star and they'd love to have you back.

So, you can keep telling yourself that your sole interest is in "polling data as it relates to religious groups." In this case, you've already indicated that at least part of your motive here is a low opinion of Catholics and a personal gratification in seeing that opinion validated. You may be surprised to learn that I don't really have a product with that. The world is full of undesirable people who see themselves as Catholics because it is convenient. But the problem that they can't overcome is that they don't get to decide whether that really are Catholic or not. Ultimately God does, but here on Earth, the Faith itself is the ultimate determiner. I laid out the rules for membership into the Catholic Faith for you. You didn't like them, because they were inconvenient to your opinion. They are what they are. So its time for you to answer the question: Who is a more trustworthy source when it comes to identifying a Catholic: The Pope and the Cannon or the liberal nerd from Gallup looking for a story.

To repeat: According to the laws of Catholicism, any "Catholic" who says that abortion is justifiable in any circumstance other than to save the life of a mother is really a Protestant who thinks of himself as a Catholic. And that's not subject to debate.

Catholics voted for Obama by 54%, I don’t know why Catholics are such a dependable vote for the left but they are. To repeat, Catholics generally vote liberal and we need to figure out a solution to that problem that the conservatives can pursue as a fix.

To repeat: People who incorrectly identify themselves as Catholics are more likely to vote Democratic. Pollsters are more likely to accept the false identication because it helps the liberal agenda. You are more likely to accept it, because it reinforces your low opinion of Catholics. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church itself has had rules in place for centuries that identify who is and who is not a Catholic, and you chose to ignore those, because they don't conform to the fantasy you've built for yourself. Its about time you identified your own hard-core conservative faith and see it it passes the smell test. I guarantee you I can walk out in front of my building right now and get three people to identify themselves as members in the next five minutes if I want to.

The vast majority of Catholics vote line Conservative. The first step is getting undisciplined pollsters and people with and obvious agenda (such as yourself) to identify non-Catholics, former Catholics, and people who are trying to have it both ways and be Protestants and Catholics at the same time correctlty. You made this a Protestant/Catholic thing, so I will remind you again that any "Pro-Choice Catholic" is, by defintion, a Protestant.

My efforts are neither silly nor Childish. I’m just helping you come to terms with the truth: A person is not Catholic just because he identifies himself as one. And there are millions of this people who incorrectly believe that they are Catholic for one reason or another. And posting another verion of the same type of poll (this one from MSNBC no less) won’t change that a bit. There are millions of Anglicans in this country who identify themselves as Catholics who don’t recognize the Pope’s authority. I’m sure they don’t do that for the purposes of polling, but does that make them Catholic none the less? Of course not. I’m taking this about as personally as I need to, because I see your entire arguement as stupid. You are afraid tp identify your own faith as asked, so let’s assume you are a Baptist who respects the authority of the Vatican over Christianity. You would identify yourself as a Baptist. Other Baptists probably would not. This is EXACTLY the same thing as what we are talking about here. You are what you do, and what you believe in, not what you identify yourself as. Different faiths have different rules. Catholicism, the oldest Christian faith, has the most rules. A pollster from MSNBC doesn’t get to determine who is and who is not a Catholic. The Vatican does. So your poll is as worthless as this conversation seems to be. It gives you a warm feeling inside to think that Catholics are more liberal and less faithful than other denominations, so you accept anything that confirms this belief.

Sorry, but the Vatican determines nothing about vote polling in America.

I don't remember saying anything different. My point remains the correct one, that the polling data is flawed and invalid if the methodology is wrong. Feel free to embrace the false results if it helps justify your opinions I guess. You're not honest about your interest in voter polling if you embrace any polling process that fails to reject respondents who are either dishonest or misinformed as to whether they qualify for the polling group. Or, worse, a polling group (such as MSNBC which a "conservative" like you refers to) that accepts them anyway.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.