I am somewhat sympathetic to the notion that, in spite of his utterly unacceptable position on abortion, Barack Obama is a good choice for Catholics, so I was interested to see Douglas W. Kmiec’s piece arguing the same in Slate.
I found some things in the piece to agree with, but wasn’t blown away by it.
Reading two responses he sent to the Corner, I was even less impressed. I kind of have to agree with Ramesh Ponnuru’s conclusion that, “once you take away Kmiec’s sour grapes over the primaries and his fuzzy thinking, there’s nothing left to his case.”
I could see a Catholic coming to the conclusion that Obama was the best candidate. I could see a conservative being driven to the Democrats by McCain’s nomination. What I cannot see is the nomination of McCain over Romney causing someone thinking as a Catholic to jump to Obama.
The main conservative critiques of McCain, as I understand them, were his support form campaign finance reform, his support for comprehensive immigration reform, and a general tendency to prefer the approval of the mainstream press to that of his own party. Well, Catholicism probably doesn’t have much to do with campaign finance reform, or McCain’s relationships with the press and his own party, and the bishops have taken a fairly severe pro-immigration stance. Add in McCain’s rejection of torture and Romney’s support for it, and the idea that a Catholic would work for Romney’s campaign but find McCain unacceptable is indeed odd.
It’s true that Romney is still on his first marriage, but it seems odd that would matter to someone calling himself a “Reaganite.”
One of the big oddities is Kmiec’s contention that Romney had a superior position to McCain on Iraq:
especially when the candidate of the status quo has a military occupation position (”100 years, sure, maybe a 1000″) that is far too flippant for an issue of human life or national security and that is directly contrary to an equally resolute teaching of the Church. So if the primary process takes out a candidate like Governor Romney who had a grasp of the kind of humanitarian rebuilding necessary to stabilize (and not merely occupy) Iraq,
If Romney possesed such a grasp, he did a damn fine job of hiding it during the primary campaign. My recollection is that Romney always tried to present himself as the most hawkish, most unfriendly to immigrants, most willing to torture, person on the stage. Wasn’t it Romney who said he wanted to “double Guantanomo?” Talk about “far too flippant for an issue of human life or national security” — it’s also worth noting that Romney took a significant detour from answering the question that was posed in order to deliver that line, clearly something he had planned to say at some point in the debate, and not a case of a question taking him off guard.
And that lie the Romney campaign spend the final weeks of its campaign whining to the refs about was that Romney wanted timetables instead of milestones for the surge. So which is it — was Romney’s position on the invasion and the surge distinguishable from McCain’s or not?
There may be a case that Obama is the choice for Catholics, but the Republicans nominating John McCain rather than Mitt Romney isn’t it.
