The Party Faithful by Amy Sullivan

Author:Amy Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The media frenzy around the Wafer Watch metastasized, with journalists doing everything but checking Kerry’s molars for evidence that he had indeed been given Communion. The candidate’s senior advisers huddled to discuss strategy. Amazingly, none of them had seen this coming. The campaign appeared to still be operating on the John F. Kennedy model, not realizing that the situation had changed in forty-four years from one in which Kennedy had to prove he wasn’t really Catholic to one in which Kerry had to prove he was Catholic enough. Catholic Democrats from Tom Daschle to Gray Davis to David Obey had endured the same threats from Church leaders in previous years. And Archbishop Burke had issued his first warning to Kerry in early January of 2004. Yet no one—not Kerry, not his friends, not his campaign staff—had anticipated the criticism or the attention it would provoke. “It never crossed our minds that this could happen,” recalls Cahill’s deputy Christine Stanek. So there was no plan in place for a next step.

Kerry and his advisers struggled to reach a decision, and when they did, it was underwhelming: ignore the story and hope it goes away. At most, a few select surrogates could defend Kerry in the press, people such as former congressman Father Robert Drinan or Illinois senator Dick Durbin. But the campaign itself would maintain radio silence. The campaign followed the same strategy a few months later when the Swift Boat attacks began. The flaw in this approach, of course, was that ignoring the situation didn’t mean the stories went away. It just ensured that the Kerry campaign forfeited any ability to influence the coverage. On one side of the rapidly accumulating media accounts were a handful of unusually conservative bishops whose presence suddenly loomed much larger when left unchallenged. On the other? “The Kerry campaign did not return calls for comment.”

The instinct to ignore the Communion stories came from Kerry himself. Northeastern Catholics aren’t used to talking openly about their faith, particularly those raised in the pre–Vatican II era. They are especially loath to take on Church leaders directly, and certainly not in public. As far as Kerry was concerned, the matter was private, between him and the Church. “We weren’t looking for a fight,” he said in an interview three years later. Furthermore, Kerry knew that he was safe on technical grounds—“Nothing in canon law condones using the Eucharist as a retaliatory tool or weapon”—and that most bishops recognized that. “There was a sense that it was being handled,” remembered Kerry. “There was nothing to be served by having a big, open fight.”

Kerry’s reluctance to publicly defend himself was understandable, but it made Mara Vanderslice beat her head against her desk. While her superiors on the campaign huddled to figure out a response to the Catholic charges, Vanderslice sought the advice of her informal religion squad. They wrote talking points that went on the offensive, promoting Kerry’s commitment to his Catholic faith. They developed a media strategy to counteract the attacks.

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