Writingin The New Republic, Michael Sean Winters argues that Senator Barack Obama can close his Catholic gap by drawing more explicitly on themes from Catholic Social Teaching, such as the common good and the dignity of the human person:

Obama doesn't need to take drastic action to make up for this deficit. He doesn't need to bring a Catholic priest into his "brain trust" like FDR did in 1932, and he doesn't need to win overwhelmingly among Catholics like John F. Kennedy did in 1960. But here's the interesting part: In articulating his economic views in ways that are especially accessible to Catholics, Obama would do much more than just increase his chances with that constituency. He'd discover that Catholic social thought provides Democrats with the kind of moral vision and linguistic clarity that their economic positions have lacked for decades now.

I would like to believe this, but I dont think I do. First of all, I have not seen a great deal of convincing evidence that Obamas Catholic gap is due to specifically Catholic concerns. I think it reflects Obamas broader weakness among working class whites and latinos. These weaknesses, in turn, are probably more attributable to dynamics of race, class, and culture than issues that are specifically Catholic in nature. If I could construct a regression equation to filter out these other variables, I suspect that the "Catholic impact" would be much smaller. That is, of course, a hypothesis that needs to be tested.More fundamentally, though, I think that Winters underestimates the extent to which the Catholic language he advocates for is no longer the languageif it ever wasof rank and file Catholics. Not for nothing do social justice advocates within the Church complain that Catholic Social Teaching is the Churchs best kept secret. Terms like the common good and the dignity of the human person may resonate among Catholic scholars and activists, but I havent seen much evidence to suggest they are recognized by ordinary Catholics as belonging distinctively to their own tradition.

There may have been a time when this was the case. If so, it was the product of an era when Catholics were raised and socialized in a distinctive culture that really was somewhat different from the Protestant mainstream. Andrew Greeley often used survey research to demonstrate the existence of this particular worldview. My recollection, though, is that his research showed that it was less prevalent among younger cohorts than those socialized as Catholics prior to Vatican II.

Thats not to say that there arent large numbers of Catholics out there who see doing social justice as a core part of being Catholic. Indeed, large numbers of them (regretfully, in my view) see it as more important than going to Mass. Its not clear to me, though, that most of the Catholics who believe this are being moved by language about the common good or the dignity of the human person. I suspect they would express their motivations using language similar to that of their Protestant or even agnostic neighbors, e.g. God wants us to love each other, etc. Not a bad thing, but hardly distinctively Catholic.

In the end, I agree with Winters that it would be salutary if the Democrats were to make less use of rights-based appeals in articulating their vision for the country. But I dont think that doing so is likely to have a large impact on the Catholic vote.