Yet another reason to dislike the Palin pick
Posted by Paul Mulshine September 06, 2008 2:41PM
As readers know, I am not the biggest fan of the Sarah Palin nomination for a number of reasons I articulated earlier.
Here's another one: John McCain's choice of her for the Republican vice-presidential nomination was an obvious attempt to pander to what many people mistakenly call "the base" of the Republican Party, evangelical and fundamental Protestants.
In fact, Catholics outnumber any other religious groups among GOP voters by an overwhelming margin. And the base of the party has a lot more Catholics in it than evangelical Protestants.
Yet the GOP has a nasty habit of not just ignoring Catholic voters but openly antagonizing us, as you can see in the column from 2000 that I am reprinting below.
McCain didn't help matters.
By the end of his selection process, the three leading contenders were a Mormon, a Jew and an evangelical. Even though the Democrats had put a Catholic in the No. 2 spot - and the Catholic vote will be pivotal in the key battlegound states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania - McCain barely gave lip service to the notion of putting a Catholic on the ticket after a minor flirtation with Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania early in the process. He seemed to think it perfectly natural to put a fellow Protestant on a ticket that has been packed with Protestants since the founding.
But there was in fact one Catholic on the Republican national ticket. Here's a little quiz. Can you name him?
Read the original story HERE (including the answer to the final question).
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