God and Hillary Clinton (26 page)

Put differently, Catholics voted for the Protestant, George W.
Bush, and did so in large part because they agreed more with him than Kerry on moral issues, rooted in religion, that were closest to Catholic hearts, like abortion. Just as Al Gore did not win the electoral college in 2000 because he could not carry his home state of Tennessee, John Kerry failed because he could not bring along a natural constituency. According to CNN's exit poll data, 27 percent of those who voted that first Tuesday in November were Catholic, which equated to roughly 31 million of 115 million voters. How these Catholics voted is striking: They voted for Bush over Kerry by 51 percent to 48 percent. In other words, they mirrored the popular vote to the exact percentage.

The numbers diverge more sharply when one compares devout Catholics to those who find their way to church only for weddings and Christmas: Catholics who attend Mass weekly voted for Bush by 55 percent to 44 percent, a startling religious rejection of John Kerry. The breakdown among states is most interesting: Bush remained close to Kerry in Pennsylvania—a state that has millions of pro-life Catholic Democrats, and that went for Kerry 52 percent to 48 percent—in large part because Bush carried Pennsylvania Catholics who go to Mass weekly by 52 percent to 48 percent. In New Hampshire, which barely went for Kerry, Bush took Catholics who attend Mass weekly by 63 percent to 35 percent.

Most impressive, Catholics played a key role in Florida and Ohio, the two states watched most closely in 2000 and 2004, respectively, and the two that were called late and made the decisive electoral college difference for Bush. In Florida, Catholics comprised 28 percent of voters, and went for Bush 57 percent to 42 percent. In Ohio, they made up 26 percent and went for Bush 55 percent to 44 percent. The margin was even wider for Catholics who attend Mass weekly: In Florida, they went for Bush by almost two to one, 66 percent to 34 percent, and in Ohio they supported Bush by 65 percent to 35 percent.

In fact, Catholics for Bush made it unnecessary to begin counting provisional ballots in Ohio. Ohio Catholics cast 780,000 votes for Bush and 624,000 for Kerry, a difference of 156,000 votes. Compare that figure to the overall vote difference for all Ohio ballots, which was 136,000. Thus, it can be asserted that John Kerry lost Ohio, and thus the election, because he could not get the support of people of his own faith in Ohio.

The issue behind this Catholic snub was abortion. Pro-life Catholics were aghast at the prospect of a Catholic president becoming the greatest champion of legalized abortion ever to step foot in the Oval Office, as Kerry would have been. Kerry protested by pointing to social justice: His piety would prompt him to boost the minimum wage and clean up the environment, but ultimately these were not the social justice issues that Catholics were voting on.

While in the aftermath of the election the common explanatory refrain was that Bush political strategist Karl Rove secured the religious vote by mobilizing evangelicals, the fact is that the Democratic Party, by running John F. Kerry, drove both evangelicals and Catholics toward Bush. Kerry did more for Protestant-Catholic unity in America than the churches themselves could accomplish. In truth, moderate to conservative Catholics had nowhere to go but to George W. Bush, even as many had grave reservations over the war in Iraq.

CNN's 2004 exit poll data point to this statistically accurate profile: Next to African Americans, the surest Democratic voter was an unmarried, city-dwelling, Northeast, pro-choice atheist with a graduate degree who thinks that gay people should be legally married. The least likely Democratic voter was a married citizen who regularly attends church, thinks abortion should be illegal, and cites “moral values” as a top priority.

The Democrats React

To be sure, the Democrats were not taken totally by surprise. The 2000 data had been nearly identical. The Democratic Party knew that it would need to make inroads with religious and values voters in 2004. Thus, John Kerry talked several times about his faith, and even got quite aggressive: Picking up the mantle from Al Gore, Kerry did what Democrats are able to get away with but Republicans cannot: He used his faith to question Bush's. Throughout the campaign, Kerry employed a Bible verse to question the Christian commitment of his political opponent, using the New Testament's James 2:14, which asks: “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?” Kerry applied this verse to doubt whether the president lived out his faith and whether Bush's policy choices were rooted in Christian principles.

Kerry began doing this early in the campaign, much earlier than had a desperate Al Gore in the waning weeks of 2000. Kerry started the tactic in a March 7, 2004, speech at a Mississippi church and leveled the accusation again on March 28, speaking at a Baptist church in St. Louis. After these first attempts resulted in no negative attention from the press, Kerry did not relent, aiming the passage at Bush too many times to count. In the final presidential debate, nationally televised on October 13, he twice applied the verse to Bush.

James 2:14 was John Kerry's most frequently quoted Bible verse on the campaign trail, cited not to illuminate his own faith but to directly question the sincerity of Bush's. Despite all the wild accusations about George W. Bush's tactics, he never stooped to the level where he publicly questioned Senator Kerry's faith. As he knew, if he did, he would have been pilloried.

Like Al Gore in 2000, Kerry got assistance from some special friends on this front in 2004: Bill Clinton, who witnessed the train wreck in November 2000, sought to help head off disaster in 2004.
In the most underreported story of the political season, as the New York papers tripped over themselves to find out if Bush's chief political operative, Karl Rove, was trying to hunt down registries of evangelical churches for the purpose of driving votes, Bill Clinton at the start of the Republican convention gave a homily at the radical Riverside Church in New York. Clinton addressed the congregation during the worship service. He accused Republicans of bearing “false witness” and being “the people of the Nine Commandments.” The pastor introduced Clinton as part of an announcement of the church's Mobilization 2004 campaign. The
New York Times
and
Daily News
were not interested in this story: They devoted total attention to the Rove story.
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Al Gore himself lent a hand: In an October 18 speech at Georgetown, the former vice president ripped into the current president: “I'm convinced that most of the president's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible.”

Despite these claims of being “holier than thou,” the election still resulted in defeat for the left. In the days and weeks after, as strategists and analysts sifted through the numbers and drew conclusions about the future of the Democratic Party, the reality for Democrats was unassailable and unavoidable: Regardless of Kerry's religious values, it was not enough to be comfortable talking about God and religion. Furthermore, as the failure of Kerry's James 2:14 quote demonstrated, it was not enough to denigrate the faith of the other candidate. Presidential candidates who want to win a general election need to back up their religious positions with stances, actions, and programs for the moral, values-based issues that drive faith-inspired voters to the polls.

These conclusions posed intriguing questions relating to Hillary: Neither Gore, Bill Clinton, nor Kerry had any credibility with the values voters they were trying to move—but did Hillary have that
authority? And, if not now, could she someday? Like her husband after the 1994 vote ten years earlier, Hillary understood the larger implications of the situation immediately and was among the first to react to this religious verdict. She immediately understood the faith factor in the 2004 vote.

This was evident mere days after the election, during a speech she gave on November 10 at Tufts University. In her address, she called it a mistake for Democrats to have not engaged evangelical Christians on their own turf, thereby ceding the vote to President Bush. “I don't think you can win an election or even run a successful campaign if you don't acknowledge what is important to people,” she said, referring to the importance of faith. “We don't have to agree with them. But being ignored is a sign of such disrespect. And therefore I think we should talk about these issues.”

She then singled out areas where she thought faith-backed Republican politicians were vulnerable, pointing to social justice: Hillary said the Bible should be cited to win debates over poverty, akin to how Republicans referenced Scripture to resist the legalization of gay marriage. “No one can read the New Testament of our Bible without recognizing that Jesus had a lot more to say about how we treat the poor than most of the issues that were talked about in this election,” said Senator Clinton, suddenly sounding once again like the Methodist from Park Ridge.
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To Hillary, the objective lesson here was not how Jesus felt about abortion, but how Jesus felt about the minimum wage. That, she judged, was a winning strategy. But irrespective of the specific issue at stake, the tone of this speech differed greatly from that of her speeches during the buildup to Election Day. The speech itself was quite removed from her battle cry at NARAL and the March for Women's Lives. Her fiery language had been replaced by words of consolation and outreach. Suddenly her speech was overflowing with talk of the middle, of values that every Christian American deemed
important. Of course this is not to say that her positions seemed to have changed at all, simply that her phrasing of them had altered.

Only weeks later, Mrs. Clinton got great news. In mid-December came the results of a stunning poll by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics: If the 2008 presidential election were held that day, Senator Clinton would handily defeat three of the top Republicans being touted as possible candidates, beating Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) 40 percent to 33 percent, taking New York Governor George Pataki 41 percent to 35 percent, and easily dispatching Florida Governor Jeb Bush 46 percent to 35 percent. The Fox News survey found that a “clear majority” of voters (59 percent) judged Hillary qualified to be president.
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The poll offered the momentum she needed. Now, looking ahead to 2005, Senator Clinton began seeking ways to appeal to the political middle, especially those religious voters. That included fixing her gaze upon that crucial Catholic constituency.

By January 2005, Mrs. Clinton was into the fifth year of her Senate term. That month presented a fascinating contrast in her new strategy to attract a broad range of voters in the run-up to her candidacy for the 2008 presidential election, but it also highlighted the risks that she runs as she seeks to maneuver through some of the country's most divisive religious issues.

On January 11, 2005, Senator Clinton gave the keynote to the International Women's Health Coalition Fourth Annual Gala. Titled “Meeting Global Challenges: Healthy Women, Healthy World,” it was a speech that proved to be as open and forthcoming about her pro-choice stance as any that she had given. Citing her work with Senator Barbara Boxer, Mrs. Clinton spoke of her proposed amendment to the Global AIDS Bill, which sought to provide assistance to foreign countries to combat HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, “and in part to provide comprehensive assistance for programs for women and girls.”

The latter meant abstinence programs, condoms, and abortion clinics. “Today, an estimated 20 million women worldwide risk unsafe
abortions every year,” she said. “And yet, as we know, the current administration is making it more difficult for women to receive the full range of health services.” She noted that “under the global gag rule,” reinstituted by the Bush administration, no U.S. funds could be provided to foreign nongovernmental organizations that provide abortions or advocate abortion counseling or legalization. Seeming to pick up lines from many of her preelection criticisms of Bush, she condemned “these ill thought out policies by this administration.” She also issued a significant public reaffirmation that “reproductive health care and family planning service is a basic right”—abortion is a basic right.
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Catholics, by contrast, have called the right to life “the most basic right.”

No doubt, those fresh words from Senator Clinton were still ringing in the ears of those who had just learned that Canisius College had invited her to speak. On January 18, 2005, Canisius, a small Catholic college in Buffalo, New York, issued a press release announcing that it had invited Senator Clinton to speak in its lecture series on the “Governmental Role in Effectuating the Corporal Works of Mercy,” to be delivered on Monday, January 31, at 1:15
P.M
. in the college's Montante Cultural Center, cosponsored by the college's Committee for the Promotion of Justice. The former first lady would address government's role in caring for the sick. As a member of the Senate committees for environment and public works, and health, education, labor and pensions, noted the college's press release, Senator Clinton had introduced legislation to expand health care coverage to children and aging Americans. The press release added that Canisius College, one of America's twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and “the premier private college in Western New York,” specialized in preparing leaders—“intelligent, caring, faithful individuals”—who would “promote excellence in their professions, their communities and their service to humanity.”
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The little Catholic college was proud of its celebrity event, but many Catholics who were not responded by rapidly organizing boy
cotts. The Buffalo chapters of Catholic Charities and the Office of Church Ministry withdrew their sponsorship, and the Buffalo diocese received hundreds of calls and e-mails complaining about Clinton's appearance.
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The Buffalo Regional Right to Life Committee was outraged, accusing Canisius officials of creating “a grave scandal within the Catholic community” by inviting Mrs. Clinton.
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The national Catholic press joined the chorus, including the popular Web site Catholic Exchange, which dubbed Hillary the “abortion crusader.”
⁵

Critics pointed to guidelines by the ten American Jesuit provincials and a letter by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stating that those who violate Catholic principles “should not be given awards, honors or platforms.” The bishop of the Buffalo diocese, the Most Reverend Edward U. Kmiec, said that he was not pleased that Canisius College invited Clinton, especially without consulting him in advance, but he declined to order Canisius to ban the pro-choice former first lady from campus.
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The bishop did, however, withdraw the Diocese of Buffalo's sponsorship of the speech, and issued a stern statement: “As Bishop of the Diocese of Buffalo, I wish to inform the faithful and the community that the Diocese of Buffalo is not associated with the planning or promotion of the lecture of Senator Hillary Clinton at Canisius College on Monday, January 31, 2005. This event has been arranged under the auspices of Canisius College without previous consultation.” He also reported that Catholic Charities had been listed as a sponsor without prior knowledge that Senator Clinton would be one of the presenters of the lecture series, and had now also withdrawn sponsorship. “We have communicated our displeasure,” said the bishop.
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Ten-Point Leadership Foundation

The day after the Canisius announcement, Senator Clinton regrouped. On January 19, 2005, the eve of George W. Bush's second inaugural,
Mrs. Clinton embraced an issue that was important to the religious voters who in November had helped elect George W. Bush: faith-based solutions to social problems. She addressed a fund-raising dinner in Boston for the National Ten-Point Leadership Foundation and the Ella J. Baker House, two groups that are big boosters of faith-based initiatives—the cornerstone of George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism and integration of faith and politics.

“There is no contradiction between support for faith-based initiatives and upholding our constitutional principles,” declared the senator in an important line bound to be quoted in the years ahead. She said there was a “false division” between faith-based solutions to social problems—backed by the public sector—and the separation of church and state. In a talk that invoked God at least a half-dozen times, she emphasized to the audience of more than five hundred, including many religious leaders, that “I've always been a praying person.” The senator from New York insisted to the Boston crowd that faith-filled individuals be permitted to “live out their faith in the public square.”
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George W. Bush could not have agreed more. Had he been there, he would have been on his feet. It was his type of program—and his type of group, directed by the Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III, a leader among clergy to halt crime and violence among city youth, and who has been critical of Boston's liberal politicians for separating faith from the policies that work effectively. Clinton praised Rivers and his (as Bush calls them) soldiers in the army of compassion. Rivers and his team, said Hillary, could “see God's work right in front of them.”

Hillary's display of her religious credentials left many suspicious of her timing. Among many Democrats, Bush's support for faith-based organizations had been one of his most suspect domestic initiatives. Now suddenly in the wake of Republican victories, Hillary was trumpeting their value and insisting on their importance. These programs were precisely the types of ideas that made Bush popular with reli
gious Americans as he sought to bring faith into public life. Indeed, support for faith-based organizations is a home run with Catholics and other Christians, including the likes of James Towey, a former twelve-year legal counsel to Mother Teresa, who lived as a full-time volunteer in her Washington, D.C., home for AIDS patients, and who became the director of President Bush's pet project, the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. These were precisely the people that Hillary would need to win over in her eventual run for president. At the same time, the public should not have been too suspicious: Hillary had spoken to audiences about her faith since the Arkansas days. This was not entirely new political terrain for her.

The Albany Speech

The Canisius fallout, on the heels of the November vote, had taught Hillary something significant about her vocal pro-choice stridency, as evidenced not even a full week later, when she was scheduled to provide remarks to another fiercely pro-choice crowd, the annual conference of the Family Planning Advocates of New York State.

Gathering in Albany, the faithful expected another no-holds-barred talk framing “anti-choicers” as intransigent fanatics conspiring to rip away all privacy rights. What they got was something quite different, as a much more politically savvy Hillary did not explode into rage against “anti-choice forces” as she had twelve months earlier. The zealots of last January were the Canisius protesters of this January and the values voters who had defeated John F. Kerry in November. Meanwhile, the press did its part to cite the speech over and over as evidence—which it was not—that Mrs. Clinton was “moderating” her stance on abortion. In fact, as the below excerpts make clear, she was moderating her rhetoric toward pro-lifers, while not changing her fervency for legalized abortion in a single area of policy.

She actually began the speech much like the NARAL talk: “I am
so pleased to be here two days after the thirty-second anniversary of
Roe v. Wade
, a landmark decision that struck a blow for freedom and equality for women. Today
Roe
is in more jeopardy than ever, and I look forward to working with all of you as we fight to defend it in the coming years.” Just then, however, the tone changed right away, with an olive branch rather than a grenade to her opponents: “I'm also pleased to be talking to people who are on the front lines of increasing women's access to quality health care and reducing unwanted pregnancy—an issue we should be able to find common ground on with people on the other side of this debate.” The words “common ground” rippled well beyond that auditorium; they were two of the most enduring words to emerge from her speech.

She did once again castigate the current administration for its international policies: “I heard President Bush talking about freedom and yet his administration has acted to deny freedom to women around the world through a global gag policy, which has left many without access to basic reproductive health services.” But in the next line came another statement no one expected: “I believe we can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.”

That would be the most quoted line from the speech. Truthfully, it was a statement of the obvious: Hadn't Al Gore and even John Kerry said that abortion was regrettable? Yet it was a big deal to hear it from Mrs. Clinton, and to hear it in this setting where people saw abortion as an unassailable absolute, never to be questioned in any way, or even to be acknowledged for the physical and emotional pain and problems it so often caused.

She then reached for more middle ground, noting, “Research shows that the primary reason that teenage girls abstain is because of their religious and moral values. We should embrace this.” Continuing, she extended another olive branch to pro-lifers, who, suddenly, were no longer the narrow-minded, simplistic “anti-choicers” they had been a year earlier—quite the contrary. Mrs. Clinton, in a startling about-
face, now valued their opinions: “I for one respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available.”

This speech marked a rare occasion whereby Hillary had allowed the idea of religious and moral values to infiltrate one of her speeches on abortion. It was notable for many reasons, but mostly because it presented such a striking dichotomy from the previous year. The contrast in style, the lack of combativeness and contempt, compared to the NARAL address, was absolutely remarkable, an unmistakable example of Mrs. Clinton modifying her approach for political purposes. The 2004 election was the only intervening event that could explain the turnabout in her posturing; Hillary did not want to see a repeat of 2004 in 2008, if and when she became the Democratic nominee. Demonizing pro-lifers worked beautifully in New York City, but would fail miserably in Ohio.

The
New York Sun
rightly editorialized the next day, “No one who listened to Senator Clinton's speech to abortion rights supporters at Albany yesterday can have any doubt that she's running for president.”
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This was obvious to everyone—well, almost everyone. The
New York Times
responded by running with the issue in precisely the way the senator's staff had hoped. “These are practical steps for cutting the nation's abortion rate,” wrote the
Times
in an editorial that commended “Mrs. Clinton's frank talk.”
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Philippe Reines, Hillary's press secretary, must have read the
Times
editorial three or four times, each time with a bemused chuckle. “The times may have changed, but her beliefs have not,” he said, stating the obvious. The times dictated that she change her rhetoric, but her heart insisted she not modify her position.
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For its part, the pro-choice lobby was not going for this olive-branch nonsense, and it was not going to accept Hillary's characterization that there was anything sad or tragic about abortion. One of the attendees, Martha Stahl, director of public relations and marketing for Northern Adirondack Planned Parenthood, told the
New York
Times
: “[W]e see women express relief more than anything else that they have the freedom to choose.” Likewise, Ron Fitzsimmons, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, stood firm and proud: “We have nothing to hide. The work we're doing is good.” Abortion, they insisted, should not be stigmatized.
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Arrival at Canisius

The senator hoped that the change in tone would make for an easier landing in Buffalo, where, on Monday, January 31, 2005, the speech at Canisius went forward. Yet pro-life Catholics were not mollified by the moderation in tone. Mrs. Clinton's presence drew protesters from several Catholic, pro-life, and Republican groups, including Judie Brown, president of the American Life League.
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“Sen. Clinton's entire career has been characterized by complete defiance toward the Church's stance on the sanctity of innocent human life,” Brown told the press. “Her repeated statements that
Roe v. Wade
should remain the law of the land illustrate how fundamentally opposed she is to the Catholic Church on this most basic of civil rights.”
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Brown added that “hosting a pro-abortion speaker such as Sen. Clinton is simply not in keeping with the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
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