(Update) More on Prof. Kmiec’s Endorsement of Obama
(posted by Mona)
Below I wrote about my Republican, devout Catholic and former Constitutional Law professor Doug Kmiec’s having endorsed Barack Obama’s candidacy. He has just given an interview to Beliefnet in which he expands on that decision, and says that the responses he’s received have been running 4-1 in his favor. Also, declares Kmiec, my emphasis:
As a Catholic looking at candidates, my faith instructs me to look at the whole person respective to the church’s social teaching on wages, education, issues of family, culture, responsibility toward the environment, the reduction of mindless or excess consumption. And the Catholic Church was quite explicit about the concept of preemptive war being contrary to the principles of just war. One of the things that happened to Catholics over the last two decades is because of the evil of abortion, we’ve been somewhat less mindful of the need to serve those around us—those who are calling upon us for assistance in a tangible way.
[...]
When I look at Obama’s eloquent speeches, his references to Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, those are so much a part of modern Catholic education. And the preferential option for the poor or solidarity with the poor, how that is not heard by the Catholic mind has troubled me. So one of the reasons for speaking out at this point, and one of the reasons to peak out on Easter Sunday, is to have my fellow Catholics reexamine this topic and listen with more careful ear.
Kmiec’s favorable reference to Obama’s invocations of Dorothy Day is the kind of a distinction I highlighted here via-a-vis a Protein Wisdom blogger who undertook a superficial analysis of Obama’s church and former pastor, finding them to be “Marxist.”
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Update:
UCLA law Prof Stephen Bainbridge — a fellow conservative Catholic — can’t make sense of Kmiec’s Obama endorsement:
Finally, in the same [10/10/07] NRO column, Kmiec explained why he favored Romney over Giuliani by noting that “we cannot afford a president who is only faking his attachment to conservative legal principle.” But Obama has no such attachment, real or faked!
Something very, very odd is going on here. The explanations simply do not explain.
Superficially, maybe not. But who knows what Romney may have told Kmiec about his views on expanding war in the ME and dealing with social issues other than abortion. Further, as Governor of Massachusetts Romney did push legislation addressing the pressing health care problem. Mormons are very family-centered, which is a good thing, and I can understand that appealing to Kmiec, even tho Romney has been a flip-flopper on the other (sexual and reproductive) social issues Kmiec is very concerned with.
But McCain is an out-and-out embracer of neocon war positions. He finds it amusing, as my first post about Kmiec’s Obama endorsement notes, to sing about bombing Iran to the tune of the Beach Boys old hit, Barbara Ann. As one well familiar with Church doctrine, I can tell you that does not play well among theologically informed Roman Catholics. Kmiec is one smart man, and nothing if not theologically informed.
March 26th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Wow. I didn’t even know Obama *had* referenced Dorothy Day. Coupled with Clinton’s (predictably) furious attempts to distance herself from Saul Alinsky–one of the more human aspects of a life otherwise dominated by single-minded careerism–it further highlights the difference between them.
March 26th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Saul Alinsky said some stuff about how any progressive who denied working with “the Reds” in the ’30s was lying. Alinsky himself was suspected of being a CPUSA member when that by definition meant being a Stalinist. But no evidence has come forward since both the American and the former USSR archives were opened on CPUSA membership/espionage that he was ever a member.
But that “connection” is why Hillary has been so frantic about keeping her Alinsky “senior thesis” under wraps. She figures some will scream “Commie!” (which the odious Bill O’Reilly did a few years ago when doing an entire segment on her paper).
I can be very hard on unrepentant Stalinists and their fellow-travelers. But the fact is, the CPUSA for all of its many, many sins, got some things right. Like ending Jim Crow, well before that was a fashionable position.
Hillary should engage in a defense of where Alinsky was right, not run from her paper.
March 26th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
I’m glad to see Mona’s recognition that at least some who joined the CPUSA in the 30s did so in an honest attempt to right social wrongs (like Jim Crow, like anti-union violence), and should not be tarred with the “Stalinist” epithet. As with any ideological group, one’s joining doesn’t mean one agrees with ALL of the leader’s (or the group’s, for that matter) views. Especially when not all of those views are clearly made in public.
March 26th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
My Dear Mike Fenger: It is a difficult issue. In the ’30s and ’40s, one could not both remain a member in good standing of the CPUSA, and question Stalin. Some of the CPUSA members’ defenses (or denial) of Stalins’ genocidal brutality are revolting.
But, there were many, many left-wing alternatives to the CPUSA. The problem is the government and anti-Communist hysterics stoked a conflation of all of these groups.
March 26th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I’m not a fan of Alinsky, but I think what he said about CPUSA makes a lot of sense. A question for Mona: is there an equivalent right-wing organization of that era or other that it would be considered unacceptable to remain a member of but okay to work with for some shared goals?
March 26th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
No disagreement — I think one has to distinguish between members of CPUSA and those who sympathized with its positions. As you say, those groups were conflated after WW2. And I do think that there were many who didn’t believe in Stalin’s brutality (as opposed to justifying) — I am not sure it’s fair to say they were all “in denial” and/or somehow complicit. I certainly agree it’s difficult to go back and be sure about motivations, intents, and extent of knowledge after 70 years . . .
March 26th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Yes. I think Charles Lindbergh was unfairly tainted with anti-Semitic views due to his opposition to WWII until Pearl Harbor — then he flew some 50 dangerous missions as a a civilian in the South Pacific. (FDR was so pissed about Lindbergh’s prior opposition to war, he would not reinstate Lindberghs’s military commission, so the nascent Air Force worked around that and used Lindbergh as a civilian, doctoring the paperwork.)
March 26th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
I am not sure it’s fair to say they were all “in denial” and/or somehow complicit.
I think it is fair to say many were complicit. Emma Goldman told them during Lenin’s reign that this was a police state, and they pushed her reports aside. The “show trials” were defended,” even in outlets like The New Republic. They just did not want to know.
March 26th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
I think Alinsky overstated the case, if by “Reds” he meant members of the CPUSA. If anything, it’s remarkable how many hard-left labor activists involved in organizing the CIO came from heterodox traditions. Many of them were small-c communists, but were either Trots or anarcho-commie veterans of the Wobbly struggles of twenty years before.
March 27th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Obama gets mad kudos from me for name dropping Dorothy Day. I think it’s influences such as her that inform his “quaint” view of independent, local organizations being something worthwhile. Unlike Hillary, whom Carson has noted has a penchant for remote government and technocracy.
March 27th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I defended Charles Lindbergh here. Recently I’ve been arguing the issue with the “libertarians” of Samizdata here.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
TGGP: I largely concur with your astute analysis of Lindbergh. And while he may have had issues with “Asiatics,” his diaries record horror at some of the tortures Americans inflicted on them which he saw while serving as a bomber pilot — as a civilian in name only — in the South Pacific. Of course, the GIs also knew that the Japense committed monstrous, outrageous barbarisms and cruelties on the Allies’ POWs, which contributed to a visceral hatred and desire for revenge. War unleashes the worst in humanity.
March 27th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
TGGP,
Looking over your back-n-forth at Samizdata (wow, to think I used to be like THEM), you could add to the discussion on Iran the fact that Ahmedinijad never actually said he wanted to destroy Israel (”wipe it off the map”), but rather wanted to remove the Israeli regime from the “pages of time”. Those who actually understand Farsi know this, and I believe Juan Cole pointed this out.
I can dig up a reference if anyone wants it.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
TGGP,
Samizdata used to be closely associated with the Libertarian Alliance, and over time became the dumping ground for Dehavilland and associated LA members who were neolibertarian hawks. Since Sean Gabb took over, most of these people seem to have vanished from the LA’s discussion list. No great loss.
I was especially amused by one commenter’s suggestion that FDR had no choice in the war with Japan because of Peal Harbor. Well, sure, aside from the fact that he’d been engaged in a dick-waving contest with the Japanese over the markets and resources of the Western Pacific since the late ’30s. The former colonial territories of England, France, and the Netherlands which Japan was absorbing into the Co-Prosperity Sphere were seen by the Roosevelt administration as an integral part of the “Grand Area” without which the American corporate economy couldn’t survive. FDR had been trying to goad Japan into war for the previous couple of years, what with the oil embargo, popup cruises in Japanese imperial waters, and the like. FDR was actually planning to initiate war with Japan, by whatever means he could finagle, if they attacked the Dutch East Indies.
One of the funniest things I ever saw was a skit on SNL, G. Gordon Liddy’s version of history. Churchill and Stalin stormed into the Oval Office and accosted FDR: “You said you’d get Japan to attack so you could trick the American people into war, and then we could all divide up Europe between ourselves. What’s the holdup?”
March 27th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Mona, I wish every neoconservative believing there is an American in the heart of every oppressed Third Worlder yearning to be freed, even if we have to destroy the village in order to save it, were as “racist” as a man who used unenlightened terminology amidst his saddened description of bloodlust in war and unequal treatment at home.