Barack's Papal Brigade

Douglas Kmiec, dean of the Catholic University law school and a former Romney adviser, thinks that Barack Obama is a closet Catholic. Or at least that Catholics are closet Obama voters. It's a confused piece on several levels (I'll get to those), but I can't say I haven't been noticing much the same thing.

First, my colleague Robert George notices something particularly "Catholic" in Obama's recent (and worth watching) speech at the Virginia Democrats' Jefferson-Jackson dinner. (My response: Catholics can't preach that well.) Then my friend Paul Snatchko says nice things about the way Obama talks about faith in public discourse. Now Kmiec. That's three times in a week. And that's a pattern.

There are other datapoints as well: Several friends of mine just joined the "we really really wish Barack Obama was pro-life" facebook group. (Sorry, guys.) The wonderful JPII memoirist Peggy Noonan, as I've noted before, seems quite taken with the guy. And is it really a coincidence that the perpetual Obama buzzword "hope" just happens to be the subject of Pope Benedict's latest encyclical? (Move over, Deval Patrick!)

Okay, so what gives?

Kmiec's policy oddities (really: if Mitt Romney had any other anti-war, open-borders, global-warming-worried advisers, he didn't tell us about them) only serve to emphasize his broader point: It's all about the rhetoric.

There's no question that Obama's a brilliant speaker, and Kmiec hints at the interesting point that his community-organizing roots have steeped him in a kind of social-justice rhetoric that's friendly toward religion generally and resonates with Catholics specifically.

Plus, he says, Obama has a kind of Reaganesque optimism too him, the kind that "makes America feel good about itself" -- and the kind that attracted the largely Catholic "Reagan Democrats" in the first place.

And that's where I get off. Kmiec may be right about the short-term politics of it all, and Obama's speeches certainly have an inspiring aura to them -- but it's not Reagan. I don't want to speak beyond my competence on this one, but it strikes me that Reagan's and Obama's optimisms come from two very different places.

Just take a look at what Obama's optimistic about: "Yes, we can"; "We are the change that we seek"; "We can build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth"; (yes, he said that). This is a contingent optimism, a hope in the future success of (Obama-led) collective political action.

That hope may -- may -- be well-founded, and it can still be inspiring; one of the appealing things about Obama's rhetoric is its constant invocation of American history (albeit, mostly the parts where collective political movements for "change" have succeeded).

But as Michelle Obama is quickly proving, that kind of "hope" can have an ugly flipside. "This is the first time in my adult life I've been proud of my country," quoth she.

What?!?

I don't want to take this too far, but I think Mrs. Obama just distilled to its essence exactly what unsettles me about all this "change" stuff in the first place. My question is not so much, "change to what?" -- it's change from what? In other words, what does this cult of "change" ultimately say about the people who cluelessly let things get so bad in the first place?

Again, I'm dealing mostly in tendencies and temptations here, but it strikes me that Obama's brand of "hope" is a very different sort than Reagan's simple trust in the good sense of the American people -- which only needed to be unlocked by the kind of policies he was advocating, not beaten into them by an endless supply of lofty rhetoric.

Think of it another way: For all of Obama's rhetorical brilliance, could you really see him giving Reagan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech? Could he speak so naturally of an America that already was and is, of ageless values that have little to do with changing our way of doing politics, as important as that sometimes is?

I haven't seen it.

UPDATE: Okay, looks like Peggy Noonan (author of the above speech, incidentally) isn't quite so enamored with Obama after all. And as one would expect, she makes my point far better than I ever could.