From Romney to Obama in two easy steps

Prof. Bainbridge wants to know, Seriously, how do you flip from Romney to Obama?:

Conservative legal scholar Doug Kmiec has gotten a lot of notoriety for his endorsement of Barach Obama. In a Beliefnet interview, Kmiec explains…
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The trouble with this explanation is that just a few months ago Kmiec was part of Mitt Romney’s campaign. I don’t recall Mitt talking about Dorothy Day very much. Why was Romney acceptable on these issues but John McCain is not?
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Finally, in the same 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.

As I responded to the Professor, It doesn’t seem so strange to me. He’s has responded to Obama positively because he’s been attracted by a rhetoric that appeals to most Catholic’s built-in desires for unity and oneness, social equality – all of the enlarging positions that made Catholics, for generations, largely Democrat in political persuasion, before Roe v Wade.

On paper, Obama’s speeches appeal to all of our better natures, and to our intellects, as well. As Peggy Noonan writes on Obama’s recent speech on race:

The speech assumed the audience was intelligent. This was a compliment, and I suspect was received as a gift. It also assumed many in the audience were educated. I was grateful for this, as the educated are not much addressed in American politics.

There is no denying that Obama is a powerful rhetorician and an exceptional orator. A smart Catholic, hearing a man speaking about justice, morality, equality and HOPE – and mentioning Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day in the bargain, can hear such a speech and think: Oh, thank God – rhetoric to admire in an uninspired age!

I believe that is why we have seen more than few “conservative” Catholics have their head turned by Obama, even if the turn was only brief. We have the inspiring and often spontaneous speeches of JFK and RFK still alive in our memories – who can forget Robert Kennedy’s eloquence upon news of the death of King?

What we forget – often – is that for all of Bobby Kennedy’s smarts and good intentions, for all that his small-c catholic generosity and his Capital-C Catholic world view pined for heaven-on-earth, when faced with bare-bones reality, the rhetoric sometimes failed.

Perhaps Kmiec is simply buying the speeches because he wants what they contain; particularly in this stagnated and balkanized era, he wants to believe that the perfect world of intellectual honesty, open debate and genuine progress toward utopia is possible.

Obama has the perfect speeches, and for some the reasoning follows: if he has the perfect speeches, he must be the perfect canddiate.

It’s analogous to someone who reads the rubrics of the perfect mass and believes since the rubrics are excellent, then all masses must be excellent. The rubrics are excellent, as is Obama’s rhetoric. But masses are often dreadfully done; they often fall woefully short of the rubrics, just as Obama, by talking unity while hanging with divisive and apparently bigoted characters, falls short of his own speeches.