National Catholic Reporter on Sam Brownback

Sam Brownback is the cover story for the May 11, 2007 issue of National Catholic Reporter:

WASHINGTON (National Catholic Reporter) – Sam Brownback, the two-term conservative Kansas senator and recent Catholic convert who wants to be president, is unconventional enough to be interesting, senior enough to be considered seriously, and substantive enough to have a message that could resonate in the Iowa presidential caucuses.

But beyond the challenges of name recognition, fundraising and organization – no small hurdles even for the so-called top-tier candidates in the Republican field – Brownback’s got a bigger problem, one that he readily pinpoints: he is trying to convince the electorate that a social conservative, shaped and tempered by a decidedly Catholic ethos, can be a political winner.

First, the message

The “protection of innocent human life,” he told National Catholic Reporter in late April from his Senate office, “is a moral absolute. It is not one of those issues that falls to prudential judgment.” Here Brownback is not talking just about abortion, where his is the leading pro-life voice in the Senate. That’s an easy one. Applying the principle to other issues is the tricky part.

“The best way to draw people into the pro-life message is to be ‘whole life,’ ” said Brownback. “I can go to the media, even the most liberal media, and talk about Darfur, about the specialness of that child in Darfur, and they’ll agree and see it,” he explained.

“I can go and talk about the flaws in our penal institutions, recidivism rates of two-thirds and the specialness of a person in prison, and they’ll agree with that. And then I’m going to talk to them about how that applies to the child in the womb.”

At which point, he acknowledged, some of his interlocutors stop and say, “Wait a minute.” Still, said Brownback, even those who balk at equating a gestating American fetus with a starving African child acknowledge and appreciate the consistency of the message. Promoting the idea that all human life is sacred and worthy of dignity “is the key way to grow the Republican Party,” said Brownback.

In the ’90s, Pope John Paul II was a key influence on the then-evangelical Protestant.

“He’d say a lot of things I really agreed with as a conservative Republican – [such as on] life issues, marriage,” said Brownback. “But then he would push me on death penalty issues or caring for the poor and I’m kind of going, ‘I wish you wouldn’t go quite that far.’ But the more I studied it and thought [about it] I saw the point: All life is sacred and we should work for all of it.”

The late pope’s message is a potential political winner, said Brownback, one that a substantial number of Iowans will embrace in the winter of 2008, catapulting their Kansas neighbor from long-shot status to top-tier contender. The key challenge, he said in his Midwest near-monotone, is to “articulate it right.”

Said Brownback, “The problem is always being able to say it in a way that attracts people and not pushes them back.”

[More]

My Comments:
Overall, a fairly even-handed and perhaps even sympathetic treatment (at least by NCR standards) of Sen. Brownback and his candidacy. Apart from NCR's usual gratuitous swipes at Opus Dei, that is.