{"id":2614,"date":"2008-11-06T08:07:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-06T08:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2008\/11\/how-he-did-it.html"},"modified":"2008-11-06T08:07:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-06T08:07:00","slug":"how-he-did-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/11\/how-he-did-it.html","title":{"rendered":"How he did it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barack Obama fared much better among religious voters than John Kerry did in 2004 — and this piece from the Wall Street Journal<\/a> helps to explain why: <\/p>\n

The Obama campaign prevailed among Catholics despite sermons and letters from several conservative bishops across the country, who warned it would be a grave sin for Catholics to elect a candidate who favored legalized abortion. In a nod to abortion concerns, the party platform suggested bolstering aid programs to reduce the operations, which total more than one million annually.<\/p>\n

The campaign staff enlisted Doug Kmiec, a Catholic adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaign, and former Reagan White House aide, who threw his support behind Mr. Obama because of his opposition to other “life issues” such as the war and lack of health care. “People realized for the first time that there was an alternative way to promote the culture of life and how much they were missing in their faith tradition when they focused on the Supreme Court,” Mr. Kmiec said.<\/p>\n

The model for Mr. Obama’s religious outreach was framed in 2005 by two Democratic advisers — Mara Vanderslice and Alexia Kelley, an evangelical Christian and a Catholic, respectively. They blamed Mr. Kerry’s loss among religious voters on his unwillingness to talk about his faith and address their moral concerns. In a white paper that circulated around Washington, the women said that if Democrats were going to shed an anti-religion reputation, candidates had to talk about faith, go on Christian radio, grant interviews to reporters for Catholic media and discuss issues that Republicans were not addressing: namely, poverty, immigration and the environment.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Mr. Obama made a speech, “A Call to Renewal,” before a large crowd of Christians in which he discussed his faith and urged secularists and progressives to embrace moral issues. His staff mailed excerpts of that speech to 40,000 pastors, an aide said.<\/p>\n

The next year, he began courting Christian professors, theologians and ethicists, writing letters expressing enthusiasm for their work and inviting them to meet with him. One, Christian ethicist David Gushee of Mercer University in Atlanta, eventually was invited to the Democratic convention to talk about his faith-based effort to stop torture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s more at the WSJ link<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barack Obama fared much better among religious voters than John Kerry did in 2004 — and this piece from the Wall Street Journal helps to explain why: The Obama campaign prevailed among Catholics despite sermons and letters from several conservative bishops across the country, who warned it would be a grave sin for Catholics to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-and-politicians"],"yoast_head":"\nHow he did it - The Deacon's Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2008\/11\/how-he-did-it.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How he did it - 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Prior to that, Deacon Greg worked for 26 years as a writer and producer for CBS News, where he contributed to \"The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,\" \"60 Minutes II,\" \"48 Hours,\" (Emmy Award, Writers Guild of America Award) and \"Sunday Morning.\" He was co-writer for the acclaimed documentary \"9\/11,\" hosted by Robert DeNiro. (Emmy Award, Christopher Award, Peabody Award, Writers Guild of America Award.) His radio essays were featured in the bestselling book \"Deadlines and Datelines\" by Dan Rather. He's also a two-time winner of the Catholic Press Association Award. Other places you may find him: AMERICA, U.S. CATHOLIC, CATHOLIC DIGEST, REALITY (Redemptorist Communications) and THE BROOKLYN TABLET. He also contributes homiletic reflections to the parish resource CONNECT!, published by Liturgical Publications. In November 2009, he began serving a three-year term as a consultant to the Communications Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Deacon Greg grew up in Maryland (Go Terps!) but he and his wife today live in the beautiful borough of Queens, New York. You can contact Deacon Greg at dcngreg@gmail.com.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/author\/gkandra"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}