In a major break from tradition, Kamala Harris says she’s “too busy” to attend the Catholic Al Smith Dinner; the story, via an item at the New York Post:
A charity event that raises millions for the city’s unfortunate, the dinner has hosted the major-party rivals every four years (with just two exceptions) since 1960, when Richard Nixon dared to join John Kennedy, the first Catholic presidential nominee since Al Smith himself, on Catholic ‘turf.’
The candidates are supposed to deliver light jabs at each other in their dueling addresses, which plainly can be written in advance — but the program apparently has too many risks of being called upon for spontaneous reactions for Harris to agree.
The Democratic nominee has done vastly fewer non-Teleprompter events than any past major-party candidate; one of her allies claims Harris is just too busy — though that’s never stopped a sitting president from attending.
Kamala says she will attend the Smith dinner in the future — if she wins in November. (Is that a carrot or a stick?)
As for those exceptions: One came in 1996, when the then-cardinal opted to invite neither nominee, presumably because President Bill Clinton had vetoed a bill that banned ‘abortions’ of babies already partly out of the mother.
There are many points here, relating to Harris and Catholics, the Catholic Church, the progressive agenda, and votes. First off, let’s look at Harris’s well-known and oft-reported distaste for “Catholic” in general. The “Catholics for Harris” effort—one of many false electoral starts in Kamalaworld, has already been roundly criticized, if not derided, as another inauthentic Harris idea:
[T]he house of the Catholics for Harris is increasingly built on sand, as they must reconcile obvious violations of church teaching with their beliefs and actions. Former Indiana senator and U.S. ambassador Joe Donnelly, in the course of praising the characters of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, said nothing of the U.S. embassy to the Holy See’s decision to fly Pride flags in June, a blatant offense to a church that still recognizes marriage as a sacrament between a man and a woman.
Matters such as infanticide and the denigration of marriage—that is, between a man and a woman—are the bottom line for a large swathe of Catholic voters, and Harris is pretty clear in her current happy, joyful, “whatever” phase of policy innuendoes, that she does not want to attend a Catholic dinner that may poke fun at her known prejudices and hard left proclivities.
The Catholic episcopal leadership — that is, the bishops—tends to be diplomatically ambiguous in matters of faith and politics:
Unlike some prominent evangelical leaders, Catholic bishops have avoided endorsing candidates and parties. You would never see a group of Catholic bishops praying over the president in the Oval Office. As a result, according to the Pew Research Center, Catholics are less likely to hear political messaging from the pulpit than other denominations. There are some rogue bishops and priests who get a lot of media attention, but most prefer to avoid politics.
The truth is that few Catholics are influenced by what the bishops say, even on abortion. Most laypeople have already made up their minds. Political parties are bypassing the bishops and appealing directly to Catholics through political action groups supporting their candidates.
If this election is going to be as close as the pundits are predicting, Catholics in swing states could make the difference. Neither party has a lock on these voters. A few percentage points one way or the other could determine the election.
However, episcopal ambiguity notwithstanding, most Catholics pay more attention to their parish concerns than to their bishops. Catholics are still emphatically pro-family and support their own neighborhoods and community concerns.
Catholics need to be wise this time around and consider the open question: Where does Kamalaworld stand on anything? It is a multi-personality picture, part Kamala, part DNC, part Biden, and 100% grift:
Harris has made every effort to moderate her positions on immigration and government spending since she helped push Biden out of the race. The Democratic Party platform goes in the exact opposite direction, adopting far-left positions on every hot-button issue voters care about. Republicans should make every effort to tie Harris to this radical document.
The state of play for the Catholic vote is currently unclear, as it is everywhere, but nevertheless, favors Trump (61%) when it comes time to white Catholics, at least according to a new survey from Pew Research — Hispanic Catholics are leaning toward Harris, at 65%.
If the needle is moving since the early September report, we can surmise that the Catholic Hispanic vote is probably trending toward Trump. JD Vance, as a Catholic convert, may be pulling more Catholics in, as he is strenuously on the campaign. RFK Jr., although understood to be a lapsed Catholic, still has the Kennedy family’s Catholic profile as a pull for Trump.
Here’s what one Catholic voting effort has to say about Kamalaworld and Catholicism:
The conservative organization CatholicVote.org, a ‘lay movement of committed Catholics’ headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, is calling Vice President Kamala Harris one of the most anti-Catholic politicians ever.
It has launched a multimillion dollar campaign in heavily Catholic swing states to try to defeat her bid for the White House, Fox News is told.
CatholicVote president Brian Burch, in an interview with Fox News, said, ‘Kamala Harris represents the most vile anti-Catholic threat of any leading candidate for president in American history. She is a candidate of the hard left. And her record and her words demonstrate a gross anti-Catholic bias and bigotry.’
It is imperative that Catholics vote for authentic Catholic values.
Burch said CatholicVote’s campaign is aimed at the key states that everyone’s focused on: Arizona, Nevada, and the upper Midwestern states such as Michigan, but also Pennsylvania.
These states, he said, are at least 20% to 25% Catholic, or at least self-identified Catholic.
Said Burch, ‘Obviously, many of them are Democrats. Many of them are Republicans. But the key segment here is going to be those Catholic voters in the middle, those voters who maybe were Democrat by tradition or family who have been disenchanted with the party and now have moved to the middle — or some of them, of course, are moving to the right with Trump.’
There’s an old political axiom that is grounded in election results. It says, “So goes the Catholic, so goes the election.”
Amen to that.
video screen grab, edited.
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