In the autumn of 1998, when Karl Rove was contriving to make Governor George W. Bush President and to build a lasting Republican majority, he came upon “The Catholic Voter Project,” a study of voting behavior in national elections since the Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960. Catholics make up more than a fourth of the electorate, but they had long defied political targeting. This was because, since 1972, Catholic voters had essentially mirrored the rest of the electorate, making it impossible for political professionals to shape a distinctive Catholic message—or even to know for certain whether there was such a thing. The study, commissioned by the magazine Crisis, concluded that the issues that moved Catholic voters could, in fact, be discerned; it was simply a matter of redefining the Catholic vote.
The term “Catholic voter,” the study argued, was meaningless, reflecting an answer given to exit pollsters, and not much more. The only relevant Catholic voter was one whose vote was influenced by the fact of being a Catholic. The Crisis project compared the voting behaviors of active Catholics—those who regularly attended Mass—and inactive Catholics, and found a clear distinction. Active Catholics characterized themselves as being more conservative than Catholics as a whole, and, although they did not necessarily identify with Republicans, they were in the vanguard of the thirty-year Catholic march out of the Democratic Party. They were patriotic, anti-abortion, and pro-family (believing, for example, that divorce laws should be tightened).
For Rove, the Crisis report posed a thrilling prospect, akin to the framing of a new constituency, to be courted and drawn into the Republican base, as Protestant evangelicals had been, two decades earlier. “What I saw,” Rove says, “was a group that was searching.” After reading the report, Rove telephoned the publisher of Crisis, Deal Hudson, who had instigated the study, and invited him to Texas to meet Governor Bush. Hudson liked what Bush had to say, and shortly thereafter he agreed to become an outside adviser on Catholic outreach for the 2000 Presidential campaign. As it turned out, Rove was tapping into something far more profound than voting differences between active and inactive Catholics; he had struck upon a deep current of discontent within the Church, which had been building for nearly forty years, rooted in contending interpretations of the faith.
Rove had chosen the ideal instrument for his Catholic strategy. Hudson was a convert to Catholicism, and, with a convert’s zeal, he embraced an undiluted brand of the faith. As a philosophy student in college, in the late nineteen-sixties, and, later, as a professor of philosophy at Mercer University, in Atlanta, Hudson had shunned academic fads—“The Tao of Physics” and the like—and was drawn, instead, to the classics, where he believed the enduring truths resided. He admired Mortimer Adler, who became a friend, and he started his own Great Books courses. Hudson’s spiritual migration—he’d been a Southern Baptist minister before his conversion, in 1984—was animated by his wish, as he put it, “to wed the truth of philosophy with revealed truth.”
Continued>>>
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/08/080908fa_fact_boyer
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