Will John Kerry's fellow Catholics turn out for him the way they did for the last JFK?
It has been 44 years since a Catholic ran for president. In 1960, more than two-thirds of the Catholic population voted for John F. Kennedy, providing him with the slight margin of 110,000 votes over Richard Nixon. According to the National Election Study of the University of Michigan, Kennedy had lost 5 million votes because of his religion.
Once again, a JFK is running for president, but Kerry represents a one-person balanced ticket: He's Jewish and Protestant in ancestry, Catholic in religion. Will Catholics again vote for him in overwhelming numbers? The answer, I think, is that they will surely be more likely to vote for him than white Protestants -- because Catholics are more likely to vote Democratic in presidential elections than are white Protestants. There is some chance of a bump of a few percentage points because Sen. Kerry is "one of us," but not a landslide as when the issue was whether a Catholic could ever be president. There are, however, a couple of factors that could change this picture.
The miasma of folklore and mythology about Catholic voting is so thick that it is difficult to persuade the liberal elite who dominate the Democratic leadership that Catholics are still Democrats. Ever since the McGovern "Reforms" and the ejection of AFL-CIO president George Meany and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley from the 1968 Democratic Convention, this elite has always assumed -- often, it has seemed to me, with a sigh of relief -- that because Catholics are politically conservative, pro-life and anti-gay, they would vote for Republicans.
When asked whether Catholics would vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976 because of his "stand on abortion," Mayor Daley stared in bemusement at the reporter and observed, "They don't vote that way." Yet in every presidential election since, pundits have suggested that the issue will win Catholic votes for Republicans. There is no evidence that attitudes on the legality of abortion among Catholics are any different than the national averages. Moreover, recent research indicates that Catholics are more sympathetic to gays and lesbians than Protestants. Myth, however, does not yield to evidence.
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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/27/catholics/index.html