One of the fascinating aspects of John Kerry’s run for the presidency was how thoroughly denuded of Catholicism his image became. Maybe it was because Kerry is French-Catholic instead of Irish-Catholic. That’s probably a part of it. The fact that several Bishops attacked Kerry over his position on abortion rights certainly didn’t help. But it was clear that there was no mobilization of Catholic-pride for a candidate that would have been only the second Catholic ever to serve in the White House. And I think I know why, and I think things will be different with Joe Biden.
John Kerry’s mother was a member of the famous Forbes family and little John was educated in elite European schools. Joe Biden’s parents were poor working class folks out of Scranton, Pennsylvania and he attended a Catholic school.
John Kerry went to Yale and belonged to the elite Skull & Bones secret society. That’s a very WASPy background. Joe Biden went to the University of Delaware and the lightly regarded Syracuse Law School. There’s nothing elite about that. By the time Kerry ran for the presidency, he had married into the Heinz ketchup fortune and was the richest member of the Senate. Joe Biden married a school teacher and remains the least rich member of the Senate.
I’m not pointing this out to be critical of John Kerry or to praise Joe Biden. But for millions of American Catholics, Biden’s life story has tremendous resonance. That just simply wasn’t the case with John Kerry. Joe Biden exudes an Irish-Catholic attitude and experience. It was easy to forget that John Kerry was Catholic at all.
In a lot of ways Joe Biden should be easier for average Catholic families to relate to than John F. Kennedy was. John F. Kennedy’s father, Joseph Kennedy, served as the first chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and was appointed by FDR as ambassador to the United Kingdom. Catholics took pride in seeing one of their own reach the higher reaches of power, but the Kennedys were not exactly like the neighbors next door.
Joe Biden is exactly like the neighbor next door for countless working class Catholics in the Rust Belt of America, in urban enclaves like South Boston, Brooklyn, and South Philadelphia, and in the inner suburbs of the Mid-Atlantic and New England.
It’s hard to say that a man that has served in the Senate for thirty-five years is not a member of the elite. But as much as any man could pull off that perception, it is Joe Biden. He never settled in DC, he never enriched himself, and he never lost his combative, working-class attitude. The guy is a champion to a whole segment of the non-elite Catholic community. And that is something that could result in a kind of Catholic-pride factor in this election. Biden has a certain authenticity that allows him to fill that role. John Kerry couldn’t pull it off at all.
Yet, it remains true that the vice-presidential pick is rarely that important in how people make their decision on election day. For that reason, I don’t expect enormous movement from working class Catholics to the Obama-Biden ticket. But I expect significant movement, and it will be quite helpful.
Biden should not be shy about playing up his Catholic identity. He should go to South Bend and give a foreign policy speech to the Notre Dame community. He should have pictures distributed of him receiving the sacrament. He should campaign with Obama in the Italian Market of South Philly and go to Saint Monica church in deep South Philly.
He should do this, not as a way to pump up the importance of his piety, but to send the message that he is culturally Catholic and from working class roots. This, more than any regional strength, is where Biden’s presence on the ticket can move a significant number of voters.
Given that over 4,000 Catholic priests have been accused of sexual abuse, and the church has had to divest itself of considerable real estate holdings to cover the lawsuits, I’m not sure that any politician wants to flaunt their Catholicism these days.
You’d be 100% wrong. There’s a reason that, Bayh aside, every person seriously considered for the VP slot was Catholic.
I think Biden’s style of blunt talk is going to do more good than his Catholicism, but perhaps those things are not to be fully separated.
Take a guy like Jim Webb. His bluntness is part and parcel of his upbringing and the culture of the military and of Appalachia. Can they be separated? Not really. Webb can fairly be said to represent a certain type of American. The same is true of Biden. That needs to be played up. Webb and Biden both represent groups that were fairly reliably Democratic until the 1960’s threw everything into turmoil. Culturally, the Democratic Party has been losing a battle to retain these voters for a couple of decades. Yet, in the North, these voters still are Democrats at heart. Yet, they have competed with blacks, especially in the urban areas, for control of the party and there are real obstacles to getting them to turn out for Obama.
Biden can bridge that gulf.
Okay, probably true.
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Oh religion, oh religion, oh religion. I’m suffocating in this swamp (read: crap).
Please — the stench of public piety among pols is still not nauseating enough to suit you? Biden doesn’t have to advertise his religion — those who care will know what he is. I hope he has the class to keep his ritual habits personal, as they should be. Democrats don’t need a Catholic Lieberman.
I would normally agree about the minor importance of the VP candidate, but I think it’s different this time. The strength Biden brings to the ticket is not his religion but the culture/personality that it no doubt helped shape. Biden is the guy next door for working class folks of every religion. Pimping out his catholicism would only dilute that power. Biden’s synergy with Obama brings new energy and attractiveness to the ticket. I think it’s that that allows us once again to hope for a blowout win in November — at least if Biden doesn’t sink into divisive religious pandering.
But your personal feelings aside for a moment. Look at history:
In 2004, Kerry lost the Catholic vote 52%-47%. Why?
Well, there are a variety of reasons, but one of the most important is that Kerry did not connect culturally with most American Catholics. Do you know what would happen to the electoral map if Obama/Biden just flipped the Catholic vote in their favor? What if they started to push near 83%?
It’s not a small matter I’m discussing here. This has the power to really move the election.
Bush consistently polled under 50%. The economy was weak. The war was going to shit.
Yet Bush won. Catholics went Republican. Latinos didn’t go as overwhelmingly Democratic as usual.
I think you have to take that election as being something of a special case with 9/11, Iraq and the issue of fear keeping Bush in office. I wouldn’t draw too many parallels.
As you say, many reasons. Catholics are no longer so skewed toward working class. Catholics no longer hang as much of their identity on their denomination. After Kennedy, having a Catholic in the WH is no longer a novelty. (Just as after Obama, no other black candidate is likely to match his number among black voters.) In the case of Kerry, there were scumbag Catholic bishops excommunicating him for being pro-choice, plus bogus patriotic emotions trumped Catholic identity politics (ie the swiftboating).
The days of Catholics as overwhelmingly Dem are over. That won’t change by getting Biden to pimp out his “faith”. We are not really in that much disagreement: I’m happy for Biden to talk about his Catholic working class heritage and how it shaped some of his values and politics. But what I got from your post sounded like yet more public piety of the Lieberman kind. Fortunately it just doesn’t seem in Biden’s nature to make that kind of spectacle of himself. And he probably knows that making a specific issue of his church membership would lose him at least as many votes as it would gain as questions are raised about his real intentions on choice, birth control, gay rights, and the rest of the issues where the official Catholic line remains in the 12th century. What you seem to be advocating is neither unifying nor strategic. Fuggedaboutit.
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many VP finalists were Catholics. Biden needs to go out and just tell his story.
Next to reading about Hillary I’m sick to death about hearing about religion. If any candidate wants to talk religion maybe it should just be regulated to something like ‘my faith’ is what guides me and this is what I plan on doing for the country period.
If I remember right Washington purposely never uttered the word god or anything that had to do with religion/god while in public office. When Jefferson was writing the Declaration, Benjamin Franklin crossed out ‘sacred’ and wrote in ‘self evident’ beccause they wanted nothing in the document to sound as if had any kind of church or superstitious leanings so even the word sacred was out. When Washington and others wrote about the ‘horrors of spiritual tyranny’ it couldn’t be more apt than it is in today’s political climate.
I don’t think it hurts for the message people to highlight Biden’s cultural and religious roots. If he’s not going around preaching his version of morality to people, what’s the problem?
It’s a problem because little Georgie already thoroughly smudged the line between church and state. This is one country with many faiths. I have friends who are Catholic, Wiccan, agnostic, atheist, Lutheran, Jewish, etc., etc. Anytime you try to pull in the followers of one religion it feels to me like dismissing the others.
Politics should be public. Whatever spiritual beliefs people hold, or don’t hold, should be private. One way of believing should not be an influence on policy or on the way politicians relate to the citizenry.
The problem booman as others have stated is that there is too much religion in politics now. I don’t care myself if Biden wants to mention his catholic working class roots but basically that should be the end of it. Mentioning it ok, highlighting no.
And if both parties are so gung ho for the ‘religious’ vote then all churches should start paying taxes-they should have a long time ago in my view.(maybe on a sliding scale even for poorer churches)The only reason they don’t pay taxes was the theory that they stayed out of politics.
So our democratic convention is going to have a Faith Forum. Yeah what was that about separation of church/state again. The more religion is talked about the more you’re setting up people for religious war here. And we have enough of that here already.
Oh, they pay “taxes”.
To the home church.
A quarter of the money received by your local Catholic complex, sitting tax-free atop a busy ought-to-be-commercial intersection, goes back to Rome. Not to the local jurisdiction. Not to the community. To Rome. How else does the Pope keep himself in lace and gilt embroideries?
Mormons sometimes have double and triple tithing at the beck and call of Salt Lake City.
Do other churches have forced contributions? :shrug:
Wealth redistributed because the home church orders it. In lieu of the IRS, there is the fear of excommunication and dissolution… eternal punishment for failure to further enrich the fat old geezers at the top of the money chain.
The local Ashram owns 3 of the 4 corners at Stanford-Powell/San Pablo Avenue intersection. The Baptist Church is on the 4th corner. Powell is a freeway offramp and San Pablo runs through 3 counties all down the East Bay… miles and miles of business traffic. This ought to be prime commercial property, bringing in oodles of tax dollars to help the community. Instead? Nada. Scot free.
And what does the community gain? Nothing. The Ashram offers lunch… for $5. Neither institution offers education, help for kids, food for the poor, health services, senior services… nothing.
Since the churches have seen fit to interject themselves into politics, from refusing Kerry his cracker to passing out literature to telling members how to vote to holding debates, they ought to interject themselves also into the standard business structure and pay their share of corporate taxes and property taxes. All religious enterprises, including the cults, and all parts of the church from the coffee-newspaper stands (some even have fast food!!!) to the main hall need to be taxed.
Fair is fair.
I couldn’t agree more hauksdottir. Churches along with big business are robbing us blind.
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It will not be the first time the Catholic hierarchy has quite a different view on political issues than Catholic laymen. Amongst priests and a few religious orde like the Jesuits, there can be astute difference on Catholic teachings and community work with Rome. JFK had to overcome bigotry against Catholics and the central power of Rome. JFK was outspoken and dealt with the issue of Catholicism. Kerry remained silent and did not confront criticism and lost the Catholic vote.
Daniel Burke wrote the following in the once reputable Washington Post:
“If Bill Clinton can be called America’s first black president, some say, then George W. Bush could well be the nation’s first Catholic president. This isn’t as strange a notion as it sounds. Yes, there was John F. Kennedy. But where Kennedy sought to divorce his religion from his office, Bush has welcomed Roman Catholic doctrine and teachings into the White House and based many important domestic policy decisions on them.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Yes, like killing innocent people — very Catholic.
What Bush did was signal he was “Pro-Life” by appointing Alito and Roberts and by his opposition to stem cell research. In every other way he was very non-Catholic except for the most conservative factions of that faith.
I despise this catering to religion. I’d be sick to my stomach to see Biden follow your suggestion of a photo op of him receiving communion. For fuck’s sake, will we ever reach the point where a person running for public office can just answer the religion question with “that’s a private matter”? This cynical flaunting of faith is vomit inducing.
Via JedReport, this quote from Biden made me laugh:
What Booman is talking about isn’t so much Catholicism as a religion or bringing religion into politics but a sort of “cultural” Catholicism, which is something entirely different.