How Obama Woos Catholics

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

How many highly placed aides does the White House have regularly doing Catholic outreach or who have extensive backgrounds in such work? Five, by my count:

1. Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Executive Director Joshua Dubois, who regularly meets with Catholic groups, from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on down.
2. Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, who says he "talk[s] with the president about church teaching and the Catholic view on policy matters as they come up."
3. Mark Linton, who directed Catholic outreach for Obama's presidential campaign and who now serves as the administration's top liaison to Catholics. Officially, Linton directs the faith-based office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
4. Alexia Kelly, the recently hired director of the faith-based office at the Health and Human Services Department and cofounder of the progressive Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.
5. John Kelly, who works in the faith-based office at the Corporation for National and Community Service and who was formerly the Democratic National Committee's Catholic outreach director.

My most recent God & Country column for U.S. News Weekly fleshes out Obama's robust Catholic outreach effort:

As the director of Catholic outreach for George W. Bush's presidential campaigns, Deal Hudson says his Democratic rivals made his job easier. "The Al Gore and John Kerry campaigns operated as if all Catholics were quasi dissenters from the church who liked the pope personally but didn't agree with him," says Hudson. Neither candidate, for instance, attempted to soften his pro-abortion rights position for Catholic audiences, although that stance was clearly at odds with Catholic teaching. That may help explain how Bush beat Kerry, the first Catholic presidential nominee since John F. Kennedy, among Catholic voters.

Now, as a conservative Catholic activist working against many of President Barack Obama's policies, Hudson's job is more difficult. "They've packaged Obama as someone who respects the church, its teaching, its moral authority," Hudson, who runs the website Inside Catholic, says of Obama's Catholic advisers. "They came up with this 'common ground' narrative that gives the impression that Obama shares the Catholic concern about abortion."

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