-Caveat Lector- Bush Aims to Strengthen Catholic Base Republicans Seeking Solid Majorities Among All White Religious Voters By Thomas B. Edsall Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, April 16, 2001; Page A02 Since taking over the White House, President Bush and top advisers have been assiduously cultivating Catholic voters in an attempt to realign a once-Democratic constituency in much the same way that the Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s won over southern evangelical Protestants. A number of Republican operatives view the Catholic vote as the linchpin of a larger Republican strategy to gain solid majorities among all white religious voters -- critical to Bush's reelection prospects. "Religiously active voters have been gradually migrating to the Republican Party, leaving the Democrats as the party of the religiously indifferent as well as the politically liberal," pollster Steve Wagner, who is a member of an informal Catholic advisory group to the White House, recently wrote in the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis. "The migration began in the 1970s among morally conservative evangelical Protestants, especially in the South. Now, with Election 2000, it seems clear that religiously active Catholics are joining in, moving inexorably away from the solidly Democratic voting patterns that used to be a hallmark of American Catholics." Bush, seeking to capitalize on those trends, has met privately with at least three high Catholic Church officials and has adopted Catholic themes in speeches; his staff has instituted a weekly conference call with an informal group of Catholic advisers; and the Republican National Committee is setting up a Catholic Task Force. In the 2000 election, Bush made large gains among Catholic voters. According to Voter News Service (VNS) exit polls, Bush lost the Catholic vote to Al Gore by three percentage points, 50 to 47. In contrast, Bill Clinton's margin among Catholics was 16 percentage points in 1996 and nine points in 1992. Wagner said those gains were largely the result of Bush's success among the 42 percent of Catholics who regularly attend Mass. "Among religiously active Catholics, who have a discernible political identity in contrast to the nonreligiously active, Bush won by 55 percent to Gore's 24 percent," Wagner wrote, citing private polling by his firm, QEV Analytics, and Penn Schoen & Berland Associates Inc. "This was the best Catholic showing for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, equal to Ronald Reagan's 1984 showing and better than his 1980 showing." Wagner's findings are supported by broader trends: The more religious a voter is -- based on church attendance -- the more likely the voter is to be a Republican. At the two extremes, voters who attend services more than once a week voted for Bush by 63 percent to 36 percent, said VNS, while those who never attend services voted for Gore, 61 percent to 32 percent. Bush, bidding to improve on those margins in 2004, has met with Archbishop Justin Rigali of St. Louis, Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh and Washington's Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. His staff has created an informal advisory group that includes Crisis publisher Deal Hudson and Princeton University political scientist Robert George. Perhaps most important, Bush has incorporated language familiar to Catholics -- what strategists call Catholic "buzzwords" -- into speeches. In a March 22 address for a new Catholic University center honoring Pope John Paul II, Bush told a gathering that included Detroit Archbishop Adam Cardinal Maida and McCarrick: "The culture of life is a welcoming culture, never excluding, never dividing, never despairing, and always affirming the goodness of life in all its seasons. In the culture of life we must make room for the stranger. We must comfort the sick. We must care for the aged. We must welcome the immigrant. We must teach our children to be gentle with one another. We must defend in love the innocent child waiting to be born." The effort to recruit Catholic voters has led to a striking change in the political climate in Washington. George noted in an interview last week that "in 1960, John Kennedy went from Washington down to Texas to assure Protestant preachers that he would not obey the pope. In 2001, George Bush came from Texas up to Washington to assure a group of Catholic bishops that he would." Republican advocacy of "compassionate conservatism" meshes well with Catholic doctrine, in contrast to more hard-edged Republican themes of free-market conservatism and the libertarianism promoted by groups such as the Cato Institute, Hudson and George both argue. "It's almost too good to be true, how much they have come to understand what appeals to religiously active Catholics," Hudson said. "We have a leader who is not afraid of sharing his vision of a country that welcomes life, protects it by law, but does it in a way that is not moralistic or self-righteous." Republican appeals to Catholics are in many ways more complex than appeals to Protestant evangelical voters because Catholics are less hostile to government and many believe in the obligation of the state to relieve poverty, George maintains. What George describes as a Catholic "third way" dates to the Encyclical letter "on the condition of the working classes" issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, and has been evident throughout the 20th century. George cites John Paul II's 1991 Encyclical as an example: "The obligation to earn one's bread by the sweat of one's brow also presumes the right to do so. A society in which this right is systematically denied, in which economic policies do not allow workers to reach satisfactory levels of employment, cannot be justified from an ethical point of view, nor can that society attain social peace. . . . Love for others, and in the first place love for the poor, in whom the church sees Christ himself, is made concrete in the promotion of justice." Opposition to abortion is crucial in appeals to religiously active Catholics but inadequate on its own, Hudson and George agree. "Pro-life won't seal the deal," George said. "People have to think the Republican Party is not just the party of the rich and the exploitative." Bush's ability to seal the deal with moderate Catholic voters will be determined in 2004, but in the interim, he has strengthened his base of support among conservative Catholics, including Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation. Weyrich wrote that he recently asked senior Bush adviser Karl Rove to tell the president "that he has mastered the art of Catholic governance." Rove, according to Weyrich, replied, "That's pretty good for a Methodist." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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