I guess to anyone who thinks that white Catholics are some massive voting bloc that goes around in lockstep with each other, this memo might be an eye-opener, if there is such a person.

Kerry was, indeed, the perfect potential person to take this on. But he failed miserably. He told us he was going to fight, then he warmed up with his shadow and went home once John McCain told him to cut it out.  

The "Keeping America Safe" numbers are a joke. But you can't turn them around without showing some spine--which is why it all comes back to that.  Ditto on "respecting faith."  Kerry could have said some wonderful things about this. Indeed, he started to do so back in July--the last month where he actually acted like a serious candidate, rather than someone going through the motions and checking things off in the to-do list Bob Shrum made for him.  He talked about faith and works, he talked about service, he talked about learning his values from his parents, he talked about how values were reflected in your deeds, rather than your soundbites.  It was a very good start. But if he actually believed all that stuff, why the hell didn't he pound the table with it every chance he got and twice on Sundays?  Why was he afraid to stand up and fight for what he believed?

The point of criticizing Kerry is simple--it's not to make the same mistakes.

We need to stand up and fight for what we believe in. We need to call them out on their hypocrisy and foolishness. We need to be fearless. And we need to be relentless.  None of this "saving up for the big one" BS.  You GAIN capital by fighting and winning. You gain RESPECT by fighting even when you can't win. And you gain OPPORTUNITIES when you fight, not knowing if you'll win. Moral: It ALWAYS pays to fight.  PERIOD.

As a Catholic who attends mass every Sunday, there was one very significant difference that I noticed compared to any past elections that I can remember. (including '92,'96, and '00 )

This was the first time ever that I experienced the Roman Catholic Church Leaders aggressively get involved in a Presidential election through their Sunday Sermons. ( Talk about separation of Church & State). I have never ever experienced PRIESTS in the past Use their Sermons to BLATANTLY take  sides on a Presidential election.

Anyone who is a practicing Catholic knows that this is very unusual for the catholic church to get directly involved in politics. It maybe more common in among Evangelicals, Protestant Churches or Baptists. The common practice with catholic churches is to maybe mention the Pro-Life issue once every month but not as a topic or as a sermon.

For one, Catholics & even Catholic priests are Divided between those who are "ONE ISSUE Catholics". This of course is the Issue of PRO-LIFE,  which makes them vote Republican everytime. While we have a large segment of Democratic leaning catholics who are Pro-Choice Catholics together with  those who believe helping the poor, fighting for lower income people & immigrants, racial equality, and many old Union Households (especially the Irish and Italian catholics) who still vote democratic.

But never before did I see Catholic Priests devote a sermon repeatedly to remind parishioners of our obligation as Catholics to be PRO-LIFE. The directive or what we call weekly pastoral letter would come from our Archdiose.

What bothered me was on the last 2 weeks of the campaign , our PRIEST emphatically used his sermon & said that "POLITICIANS who are Catholic but Pro-Choice should NOT be supported by any Good catholic. Obviously, the whole congregration knew that he was referring to John Kerry ( he being catholic & pro-choice).

After conferring with Catholic relatives and friends in other states such as NJ, NY and IL, THEY ALL SAID THE SAME THING. It was going on everywhere.

In fact, my entire family noticed how it escalated by the last two weeks of October as we got closer to the election day. It culminated on the Sunday before election day where THE PRIEST BASICALLY SAID that if you vote for the Candidate who is AGAINST LIFE, you will burn in hell.

In all my years, NEVER EVER do I recall the Catholic Church hierchy get so BLATANT and AGGRESSIVE in actually taking sides in a Presidential race.

In fact, I heard that the New Jersey Star Ledger, the Jersey Journal both in NJ & the New York Times did an article on this. They  FOUND some Catholics in NJ & NY ( MOSTLY SENIOR CITIZENS) who immediately went to CONFESSION right afer they voted for John Kerry ! SICK! That's how scared some people were of the threat by Priests of going to hell.

Some local democrats accused the Catholic Church of aggresively using the Pro-Life issue this election to MAKE-UP for SO MANY EMBARASSING & Negative Publicity of cases of Child Molestation.

CRAZY but True!  I am sure that made a difference in the catholic vote this election especially if it was done on a national level.

1928 Catholic Democratic presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith brought out Catholic immigrant voters in record numbers.He carried 12 largest cities while his two democratic predecessors in 1924 & 1920 both lost those cities by over 1 million votes.
Most importantly, the inner-city Catholic voters started a shift in the balance of political power in the United States.

In the 1960 presidential race, the nation's second Catholic Democratic presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy, was saved by the Catholic urban vote in the rich electoral states of the Northeast and Midwest. In these regions, he carried over 80 percent of the Catholic vote.

As writer Michael Barone has pointed out, the Kennedy results "split the nation along religious lines, which is to say cultural lines, not along lines of economic class." Put another way: Kennedy's election was not a victory for liberalism, it was a victory for Catholicism.

Fast forward 2004 Presidential Election, the 3rd Catholic Democrat John Kerry runs for President.

He faced a born Methodist-Evangelical Christian George W. Bush. Bush touts himself as a  " Compassionate Conservative" who proclaims No-tolerance stance on issues important to Catholics. Kerry continues to struggle to separate his religious beliefs from his conflicting political voting record on teachings on abortion, funding of abortion, partial-birth abortion, gay-rights, domestic partnerships, and stem-cell research.

This has not set well with Catholic leaders throughout the United States who have expressed their disapproval.

New York's Alfred E. Smith Dinner, held annually in October, is the nation's premier Catholic event. In past years, the dinner's dais has showcased the United States' leading politicians, including Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, Reagan and Carter in 1980 and Bush and Gore in 2000.

Though unnoticed by a majority of U.S. Media, the Smith Foundation Board of Trustees chose not to invite John Kerry, a Catholic as a guest speaker, shattering any illusions John Kerry may have had concerning the attitudes of many of his Catholic confreres

Come election day, Catholic John Kerry fails to deliver the much needed Catholic vote. While he gets strong support from  Non-practicing "cafeteria" Catholics who are congregated in the northeastern and far western states that Kerry carried, practicing Catholics which are major voting blocs in the key swing states such as Ohio and Missouri did not come through. He also did below expectation among Catholic voters in states that he won such as Pennsylvania ,Michigan, and Wisconsin. In both PA & MI, the strong African-American support was able to offset the decrease in catholic support.

As Stanley Greenberg has often stated, these PRACTICING CATHOLICS are "those most committed to and identified with the Church and most likely to bring their Catholic identity into politics."

As a Catholic, the real story of the 2004 campaign will be that practicing Catholics emerged to defeat a man who was baptized a Catholic, served as an altar boy, and claimed he is a "believing and practicing Catholic."

wedge issue
death penalty

phat

His criticism of John Kerry on this has a lot of people upset with him, but I think he's essentially trying to make the case that rather than calling Republicans liars for characterizing Dems as unfriently to religion, Dems are going to get farther in the long run by showing more respect for faith.

It may be more effective to show the lie is a lie by  exhibiting the behavior that proves it's a lie than by calling the person who tells the lie a liar.

Their Christian supporters may be sincere in trying to outlaw abortion but the Republican Politicians are NOT.

If they were serious about outlawing abortion, what are the hell are they waiting for? They control all 3 branches of government!

The GOP is now using this same PRO-LIFE agenda  to attract the fastest growing immigrant groups that traditionally vote democratic such as the Latino & Filipino communities which are predominantly more conservative Pro-Life catholic groups.

These Republican politicians are the biggest hypocrites !  

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Party Inverted
By BILL BRADLEY

IVE months after the presidential election Democrats are still pointing fingers at one another and trying to figure out why Republicans won. Was the problem the party's position on social issues or taxes or defense or what? Were there tactical errors made in the conduct of the campaign? Were the right advisers heard? Was the candidate flawed?

Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.

It is not quite the "right wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton described, but it is an impressive organization built consciously, carefully and single-mindedly. The Ann Coulters and Grover Norquists don't want to be candidates for anything or cabinet officers for anyone. They know their roles and execute them because they're paid well and believe, I think, in what they're saying. True, there's lots of money involved, but the money makes a difference because it goes toward reinforcing a structure that is already stable.

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.

Democrats choose this approach, I believe, because we are still hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality. The trouble is that every four years the party splits and rallies around several different individuals at once. Opponents in the primaries then exaggerate their differences and leave the public confused about what Democrats believe.

In such a system tactics trump strategy. Candidates don't risk talking about big ideas because the ideas have never been sufficiently tested. Instead they usually wind up arguing about minor issues and express few deep convictions. In the worst case, they embrace "Republican lite" platforms - never realizing that in doing so they're allowing the Republicans to define the terms of the debate.

A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure.

If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.

Bill Bradley, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey, is a managing director of Allen & Company.

In 96, Clinton was the sitting president.  in 00, Gore was the sitting VP.

The only valid comparison would be 92 where Clinton, (challenger), beat Bush (incumbent).  But we all know that the results are quite different.

Democracy Corps is promoting Hillary here.  This is all they do.

I agree with many of the recommendations-the Democrats need to fight for the POOR again, as well as the "middle class."  I have an elderly Catholic friend, who is in her 80's.  She now votes Republican.  As a strong Democrat, I pressed her on the issue of what prompted her change.  She said that when she was young the Democrats were known to be the party of the workers and the poor.  The Democratic Party was not the party of the rich.  The Democrat no longer have this strong reputation.  I wonder if the Democrats talking about being "pro-business" and support of NAFTA, their identification with the academic elites, etc., have any  connection to the lost perception of the Democrats as being pro-worker.

The second main issue in losing this lady to the Republicans-is, of course-the abortion issue.  Millions of Catholics are pro-life, myself included.  I found myself wrestling, this election, not for the first time, with how I as someone who is pro-life can support the presidential candidate of a party that has told pro-life Democrats and Catholics that they are not welcome, and that panders shamlessly to NARAL Pro-Choice America.

I think that if the Democratic Party begins to fight for the people again, and says to hell with the lobbyists and the Big Corporations; and has the courage of convictions to at least become neutral on abortion-respecting the fact that millios of Americans view abortion as murder-they will have a chance of reclaiming vast numbers of formerly Democratic Catholic voters; perhaps even a smaller number of formerly Democratic white Protestant southern voters.

I'm not sure if this even will work.  But we have tried almost everything else, including running two white Southern Baptist candidates in the same years, 92 & 96, and a Southern Baptist in 2000, who could not even win a single Southern state in 2000.

Also, we need to fight with CONVICTION.  We can't seem to be taking a position based on political calculations.  We have to do it because we believe it to be the right thing to do.  That is why, (even though it is sickening to watch), Bush was able to convice substantial numbers of voters to vote for him even though they disagreed with him on many other issues-they felt Bush stood up for and fought for what he believed.

If the Democrats want to stay out of power for decades to come, absent a new Great Depression, all they need to do is keep on dissing the moral and religious convictions of millions of their formerly faithful supporters in the Catholic and evangelical churches.