Confessions Of A Confused Romneyite
Several times over the past few months I wondered why so many Catholics supported Romney. I’m not sure I’m any closer to an answer, but if Douglas Kmiec is at all representative of Catholic Romney voters the explanation may simply be that they are very silly people. There is something amusing about one of Romney’s advisors all but declaring for Obama in an article that comes out the day that reports come out that his former boss will be endorsing McCain (the Republican who routinely won the greatest pluralities of Catholic voters in almost every state for reasons that are equally obscure to me), but more entertaining still is watching a Romneyite go through any number of contortions to come up with unusually weak reasons to support anyone except McCain. However, when it comes to political contortionism, Kmiec must have learned from the best, so his effort here is quite disappointing.
Consider his argument for Obama-as-Reagan:
Reagan liked to tell us he was proudest of his ability to make America feel good about itself. He did. Catholic sensibility tells me Obama wants it to deserve that feeling.
Actually, “Catholic sensibility” doesn’t tell him that–you can perceive this about Obama regardless of your religious sensibilities, since it is one of the most obvious elements of his campaign. Kmiec then goes on to outline how relatively few Catholics seem to feel what seems to be the pro-Obama sensibility that he has:
But lately, Obama has been narrowing the gap, using the Catholic vote to vault to victory. In the Illinois primary, where Obama bested Clinton 65 percent to 33 percent, he attracted 48 percent of the Catholic vote. When Obama’s share of the Catholic vote drops, the races tighten: In still-undecided New Mexico, only 39 percent of Catholic voters went for Obama.
But he didn’t “use the Catholic vote” to win Illinois–he won Illinois because of his enormous advantages as Senator from Illinois, the strong backing of the Daley machine, and black and progressive voters in Chicago. That is, he most likely won in Illinois despite his weakness with Catholics, rather like Huckabee wins on his home turf in the South in spite of his tremendous weakness with Catholics. Where Catholics make up a larger proportion of the population (as they do in my home state), he struggles in the kind of caucus format in which he normally blows Clinton out of the water. Of course, in New Mexico his problems are compounded by the plurality Hispanic population and the larger number of downscale voters in the state.
Actually less persuasive is Kmiec’s resort to Catholic teaching to rationalise what appears to be his support for Obama (or at least his refusal to support Romney’s former rivals). Presumably he was applying the same standards when he chose to support Romney, who supports capital punishment and the war in Iraq, and yet now McCain and Huckabee are insufficiently pro-life to win him over. But, gosh (as Romney might say), Obama sure is swell! In Kmiec’s own words:
Beyond life issues, an audaciously hope-filled Democrat like Obama is a Catholic natural. Anyone seeking “liberty and justice for all” really can’t be satisfied with racially segregated public schools that don’t teach. And there’s something deeply hypocritical about being a nation of immigrants that won’t welcome any more of them. And that creation that God saw as good in Genesis? Well, even without seeing Al Gore melt those glaciers over and over again, Catholics chose Al to better steward a world beset with unnatural disasters. Climate change is driven by mindless consumption that devotes more ingenuity to securing golden parachutes than energy independence.
So, to recap, Kmiec used to work for the candidate who eagerly embraced the mantle of restrictionist and received the endorsement of Tancredo and who opposed cap-and-trade and Kyoto (all of which he must have found objectionable and wrong), but he might not support McCain, renowned champion of amnesty and these same regulatory regimes, because Obama is just too neat.
Concluding, Kmiec writes:
The launch of “Reaganites for Obama” might not be far behind. We might not be there yet, but we’re getting close.
It can’t say much for the article that the audience would have absolutely no better idea why this is the case at the conclusion than they did at the beginning. As near as I can make out, the argument for such “Reaganites” to support Obama is that Obama is…not John McCain. Now it is true that Obama is not McCain, but I’m still not clear on why that should make a “Reaganite” prefer Obama.
9 Responses to “Confessions Of A Confused Romneyite”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Daniel,
What a mess that article was! The best I can figure from what he wrote is this: Reagan was eloquent. Obama is eloquent. Therefore, Obama is the new Reagan.
Congratulations on the new site.
Send me a private email to tcowan at jcowaninc dot com, and I will send you a link to my thoughts down here behind the Texas firewall.
Best regards, Terry
Catholics, particularly white Republican-leaning Catholics, are culturally conservative, have little tolerance for religious bigotry, are a bit wary of evangelicals, tend to be more moderate on issues like Israel, liked Romney’s stable family life, and generally liked that he at least appeared to be a convert to conservatism.
Obama, on the other hand, appeals to white guilt and black power everywhere. It’s a potent combination, because he also represents, at least apparently, a way of sorting out the long-festering racial resentments in American life. Of course, he’s an extreme left-liberal, has no apprent management ability, and we’ll quickly realize that he’s bullet-proof with the mainstream media because of his race. McCain will meekly run his campaign but lay off Obama’s record, views, and find it hard to outmaneuver him.
Far from inaugerating an age when Americans can get a healthy familiarity with criticizing a black man as President and thus get over our paralyzing fear/guilt/resentment as a white-majority country, I predict instead even looser accusations of racism and, possibly, rioting if Obama somehow loses the election.
Catholic support has been strong with Giuliani, Romney, and McCain, at least if you are looking at Catholic Republicans which have been about 40% of Catholics this time around. Complicating this has been the Hispanic and Cuban Catholic vote that went heavily for McCain and oddly enough for Giuliani in California. Roach has summarized the white Catholic vote very well. On the Democratic side, you have a lot of Catholic feminists who want Hillary right now. The Catholic vote overall hasn’t really broken other than refusing to support Huckabee. I imagine that has a little to do with dis-satisfaction with how the Evangelical and Catholic cooperation has worked out.
One also wonders if there’s something deeply hypocritical about a nation that once practiced slavery yet nonetheless bans it outright today.
It’s telling that advocates of mass immigration routinely fall back on arguments premised on absolutely ridiculous axioms that, if used in just about any other political context, would invariably lead to the speaker being laughed off the stage.
My bitter rant of the month:
There’s something deeply hypocritical about a country that took away a third of a neighbor’s territory in war, that went to war when Saddam Hussein did the same thing.
There’s something deeply hypocritical about the one country that used atomic weapons against inhabited cities threatening war because a distant rival might be manufacturing the same type of weapons.
There’s something deeply hypocritical about a country that fought a bloody war to keep eleven states from seceding, abetting secession from the heartland of a distant country three times as old, whose soil is thick with the blood of its martyrs.
There’s something deeply hypocritical about a country that wallows in trade and fiscal deficits preaching austerity and creditworthiness to the poorest nations on earth.
There’s something deeply hypocritical about a country that fancies itself a City on a Hill imagining it is enlightening the world with fast food, gangsta rap, celebriporn, and explosion-and-chase movies.
As if.
I’m not so sure if Catholic voters support for McCain isn’t better understood as an aversion to Huckabee’s overt evangelical campaign. Kmiec moving from Romney to (maybe) Obama is as embarrassing and muddle-headed as Andrew Sullivan’s support for Obama. A certain type of commentater prefers the intangible atmospherics of a campaign more than the policy specifics.
Of course Catholics like McCain. His last name tells them all they need to know. Mick. Enough said.
[...] Doug Kmiec has endorsed Obama (via Sullivan). My previous critiques of Kmiec’s pro-Obama arguments are here and here. While I cannot get myself to the same point as others on the right have done, there was one section from Kmiec’s statement that seems entirely right to me: Our president has involved our nation in a military engagement without sufficient justification or a clear objective. In so doing, he has incurred both tragic loss of life and extraordinary debt jeopardizing the economy and the well-being of the average American citizen. In pursuit of these fatally flawed purposes, the office of the presidency, which it was once my privilege to defend in public office formally, has been distorted beyond its constitutional assignment. [...]
[...] Ross talks about the Bacevich and Kmiec endorsements of Obama, which I am likewise inclined to see mainly as statements of how utterly unacceptable they find McCain and the modern GOP, at The Current and also here. It seems clear to me that both endorsements hinge on foreign policy disagreements with the Bush administration, and both see Obama as a possible improvement over the status quo and in any case much to be preferred to McCain’s promise of more of the same. On anything else, especially domestic social policy, the problem is fundamentally one of trust: the GOP could say anything at this point on any of a host of issues, and for many conservatives it wouldn’t matter. Regardless of platform differences and potentially worse domestic policies coming from the other party, the GOP is now seen by many on the right as operationally no better than the Democrats and in many respects much, much worse. Indeed, because they are for the most part operationally no better, it is that much worse to continue to entrust them with power. [...]