Both Sides of Obama’s Campaign Mouth
By Deal W Hudson and Keith A Fournier
October 26th, 2012
Catholic Online
www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=48219
When people speak out of “two sides of their mouths” not only is falsehood spoken but laughable incoherence. The only way such a “stretching” of the truth can be effective is by guaranteeing that one group hears the message from one side, and the message from the other side goes to a different group.
WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) – Don’t talk out of both sides of your mouth; avoid careless banter, white lies, and gossip. (Proverbs 4:24)
The Obama campaign should take a look at Proverbs 4:24, because the mouth of the campaign is looking incredibly wide, the sides are so far apart.
The message coming from the Obama campaign and its Catholic surrogates is that the President is “pro-life” and does “not support abortion.”
The other message is that you should vote for Obama because he supports “a woman’s right to choose.”
We have already reported the Obama campaign call to a Catholic voter that touted the President as “pro-life.” If you have trouble believing that any Catholic would publicly stand behind this statement, take a look at this article by Prof. Nicholas Carfardi, the former Dean of the law school at Duquesne University. The first sentence, by the way, is an outright lie:
“Obama’s Affordable Care Act does not pay for abortions. In Massachusetts, Romney’s health care law does. Obama favors, and included in the Affordable Care Act, $250 million of support for vulnerable pregnant women and alternatives to abortion. This support will make abortions much less likely, since most abortions are economic. Romney, on the other hand, has endorsed Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s budget, which will cut hundreds of millions of dollars out of the federal plans that support poor women. The undoubted effect: The number of abortions in the United States will increase. On these facts, Obama is much more pro-life than Romney.”
Carfardi’s article continues, inevitably, to call Romney “pro-abortion.” When people speak out of “two sides of their mouths” not only is falsehood spoken but laughable incoherence. The only way such a “stretching” of the truth can be effective is by guaranteeing that one group hears the message from one side, and the message from the other side goes to a different group.
If groups begin hearing from both sides, then the campaign is in trouble. Truth has become a casualty. Well, in the case of the incredibly elastic Obama message machine, it’s already happened. At 2.20 p.m. yesterday, the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Catholics Network, Ted Meehan, received a phone call. Being a veteran of political campaigns, Meehan got out his pencil and paper to jot down what the caller had to say about Obama and Romney. Here is Ted Meehan’s report:
“I got a call at about 2:20 p.m. The caller identified them self as being from some generic sounding polling company, i.e., like the Public Policy Survey Associates, and started asking ‘qualifying questions.’ Was I over 18? Registered to vote? Married? Ethnicity? Age? City, suburbs, or rural? How likely to vote? Voting for Obama or Romney, Casey or Smith? Favorability towards Obama or Romney?”
Then Meehan was asked, “Which candidate is more trustworthy to handle the following issues — deficit, taxing the middle class, healthcare, abortion, same sex marriage?”
Please note that two out of the five are settled, non-negotiable issues for Catholic voters, making 40 percent of this call about the handling of intrinsic evils.
Then, Meehan told us, came the “push element” of the Obama campaign phone call. The caller said:
“I have a few statements about Governor Romney, and I want you to tell me whether you think these are true, very true, somewhat true, not sure, somewhat untrue, or definitely not true.”
“Romney’s entire career has been spent taking over businesses, laying off workers, and becoming rich at the expense of others.
Romney wants to take away women’s reproductive healthcare.
Romney’s policies favor the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.
Romney wants to eliminate Medicare.
Romney plans to raise taxes on the middle class.”
When Meehan’s answers convinced the caller that he was not an Obama supporter, the call abruptly ended, and when Meehan checked the line for caller ID there was no imprint.
Of course there was no imprint, because the call contained no reality, no truth; it was a call intended to put the shadow of doubt, or fear, into the mind of an undecided voter.
Like the call from the other side of the campaign’s mouth claiming Obama was pro-life, this kind of messaging descends from the netherworld of political sophistry — or in less polite terms, the underground of “Catholic” political consultants who are willing to sell themselves and their Church for the spoils of a Nov. 6th victory.
[Another "Catholic" law prof who says that Obama is the "serious" pro-life candidate]
Catholic, Pro-Life and Voting for Barack Obama
Charles J. Reid, Jr.
Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas
Posted: 10/26/2012
www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/catholic-pro-life-and-voting-for-barack-obama_b_2024427.html
Life matters. From conception to natural death, it matters. This is a principle Catholics must carry with them into the voting booth.
But it is not a simple binary equation. It is not an either/or proposition. In the end, determining which candidate better serves the interests of life is a prudential judgment. A simple promise to overturn Roe v. Wade does not automatically make one the pro-life candidate.
In my estimation, Barack Obama is the more seriously pro-life candidate in this year’s presidential contest. Voters should not forget his early connections to the Catholic Church. He attended St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School in Jakarta for three years. His mother, Ann Dunham, assisted Fr. A.M. Kaderman, S.J., in managing an English-language training school during this time. When Barack Obama worked as a community organizer in the middle 1980s, he did so out of the rectory of Holy Rosary Catholic Church on the South Side of Chicago, where he helped to coordinate the efforts of eight Catholic parishes and numerous other religious organizations to improve the lives of unemployed steel workers and others whom the financialized economy was leaving in the dust. He still considers the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago an inspiration. (On this background, see the wonderful new book by the Catholic legal scholars Douglas Kmiec and Ed Gaffney, and the Harvard Medical School Professor of Pediatrics, Dr. Patrick Whelan, “America Undecided: Catholic, Independent, and Social Justice Perspectives on Election 2012.”)
Kmiec, Gaffney and Whelan stress that there is no more powerful abortifacient in this country than poverty. It may be difficult for the comfortable, upper-middle class conservative Catholics who support Mitt Romney for “pro-life” reasons to associate with this reality. But imagine for a moment a young woman, 18 or 20, 25 or even 30 years old. She comes from a broken, impoverished family and has little real economic future. She’s gone through a bad relationship or two, and faces a soul-crushing existence being nickel-and-dimed through a series of dead-end jobs in America’s service economy. She is poor, desperate, alone and maybe even threatened by her boyfriend. The jobs are so haphazard, the poverty so shattering, that family formation is impossible. A powerful description of the plight of women who lead these lives of invisible suffering can be found in Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel-and-Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” (2001). Conditions have only grown more acute in the decade since Ehrenreich wrote her book.
In fear, in humiliation, in aching isolation, she seeks an abortion. This bleak portrait depicts the tragic dimensions of the abortion crisis in America. It is a crisis born not of the selfish pursuit of the glittering baubles of American materialism, but of the panic-stricken sense of having nowhere to turn. And it is fed at the top by politicians who prize Randian individualism and the unfettered quest for riches above every human value.
The Netherlands and Germany have abortion rates less than one-third of the United States. Why? Because those nations address the cause of abortion at its root — poverty. They provide pre-natal and post-natal care, and a social system that genuinely assists the new mother who chooses life.
President Obama’s Affordable Care Act represents a small, measured step in the direction of maternal assistance for women in crisis. It does not go nearly far enough, in my judgment, but in our present political environment it is probably the best that can be achieved. It is grounded on the basic premise of Catholic social thought, reiterated time and again by the popes, from Leo XIII to Benedict XVI, that health care is a fundamental right. It is the indispensable starting point of a seamless ethic of life.
The Affordable Care Act legislatively recognizes this fundamental moral right. Among its provisions, the ACA creates a Pregnancy Assistance Fund. Specifically on the issue of crisis pregnancy, this fund assists in several ways. It can cover the salary of counselors who point young women in the direction of social services. It supports parenting classes and aids with day-care costs at colleges and universities. It teaches and supports and, in sum, helps equip panicked, pregnant young women to become responsible, future-directed young mothers.
The Affordable Care Act helps save unborn lives in other ways as well. It increases tax credits for adoptions, making this loving alternative more affordable and more readily available. It recognizes that Medicaid currently pays for one-third of all live births in America and promises to maintain adequate funding for this vital service. Abortion is a serious wrong, but it is better, as the proverbial saying goes, to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
And what do the Republicans, that ostensible pro-life party, offer in return? They deny that health care is a basic right, describing it instead as a matter of “personal responsibility,” thereby repudiating a foundational principle of Catholic social thought. They promise the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including presumably the Pregnancy Assistance Fund and the adoption credits. They solemnly pledge to slash budgetary allocations to Medicaid, thus fueling the ever-deepening desperation of the pregnant poor. And in life’s final years, the Republicans will voucherize Medicare, putting at risk the health and well-being of millions of senior citizens.
Well, one might retort, perhaps the Republicans will at last reverse Roe v. Wade. The reversal of Roe v. Wade has been a part of every Republican platform since 1980. Hasn’t happened yet. Catholics who cling to this thin reed should prepare for disappointment. The Supreme Court will perpetually be one vote short of reversal.
A recent poll shows that Catholics prefer candidates who give attention to the poor than abortion (see Chicago Tribune, “Catholics Want More Focus on Poverty Than Abortion, Survey Finds,” October 24, 2012). In reality, it is not one or the other. Fight poverty, and you fight abortion. So, I am voting for life — Obama-Biden 2012.