Catholic Vote Is Harbinger of Success for Clinton

[CarolNYC]

Catholic Vote Is Harbinger of Success for Clinton
By JIM DWYER
Published: February 9, 2008

Hillary Rodham Clinton has run away with the votes of Roman Catholic Democrats in nearly all the primaries, often beating Barack Obama by two to one or better, exit polls show. In New York, she received 66 percent of the Catholic vote to his 30 percent.

“I didn’t go to bed until 1 in the morning waiting on the results,” said Joe Quinn, a Catholic who is a building superintendent on the Upper West Side. “I slept very well, let me tell you.”

Catholics, who make up about a quarter of the registered voters in the country, have backed the winner of the national popular vote for at least the last nine presidential elections, going back to 1972. The Catholic scorecard: five Republican and three Democratic presidents, and one popular-vote-winning but presidency-losing Democrat, Al Gore.

No other large group has switched sides so often, or been so consistently aligned with the winners. Over that same period, a majority of white Protestants typically voted Republican, while blacks of all faiths and Jews strongly backed Democrats.

(snip)

Mr. O’Dwyer maintains that Mrs. Clinton as a senator — and Bill Clinton, as president — paid attention to ethnic and working-class Catholics who were often overlooked by both parties. “Every one of the ethnic groups got a hearing,” he said, making them comfortable with Mrs. Clinton’s position on Social Security, health care, education and immigration. And both Clintons, he said, had played central roles in brokering an end to the armed conflict in Northern Ireland.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/09/nyregion/09about.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin

[pingzing58]

1. You've cited issues that concern me and my family. That's why she has my vote.

[theredpen]

2. The article makes an excellent point about powerful women in the Church

As far as punditry goes, this prediction may end up turned on its head like most of the others. We'll see.

I did like the point that Catholics are already accustomed to thinking of women in leadership positions. It always gets under my skin when people bash the Catholic church for excluding women from the priesthood because that is hardly the be-all-end-all of Catholic veneration. There are more women who are Saints than men. Furthermore, there are female Saint who were scientists, doctors, warriors and all sorts of "traditionally male" roles. I can't think of an institution with a greater wealth of role models for girls and women than the Catholic Church — the alleged bane of egalitarianism.

I strongly suspect that the people who claim that they could never be Catholic because of its "sexist stance" on the clergy wouldn't be Catholic even if that were reversed. (I do know gay Episcopalians who would gladly return to the Church if they felt welcome, but that's a whole different story.)

Anyway, one of the "plus" points for Clinton (really, the Clintons) was Bill's involvement in resolving the ongoing strife in Northern Ireland. That was a great achievement that benefited both Catholics and their close Anglican cousins (aka "the Protestants"). Still, the Catholics in my state (Texas) are Hispanic. Senator Clinton has been doing well with Hispanics, but I'm starting to suspect that it is because many Hispanics have been apolitical and just weren't familiar with Senator Obama. That has certainly changed at this point. The racist "anti-immigrant" campaign of the right has politicized the Hispanic demographic and Barack Obama has enjoyed a great deal of exposure recently. We'll have to see if this results a change in Hispanic voting.

For my part, I'm not foolish enough to make any predictions in this election.