I left my calendar back in the time machine. What year is this?
Is it 1928, when America challenged centuries of religious prejudice as the Democrats nominated the first Roman Catholic candidate for president, Al Smith?
Or is this 1960, when John F. Kennedy became the first (and so far, only) Catholic elected president?
As everyone knows, Democrats have now broken with centuries of racial prejudice by nominating the first African-American candidate for president. As my friend George Walker notes, Obama is actually mixed race, but the “one-drop” rule apparently still applies to political history.
But is this 1928, when Smith’s candidacy was drowned under a cataract of bigotry aimed at all “papists?” Or 1960, when Kennedy convinced Americans that they had bigger things to worry about than whether their president ate fish on Fridays?
If this is 1928 redux, John McCain will be our next president. If it’s 1960, Barack Obama better get used to “Hail to the Chief.”
To be sure, there are issues other than race in this election. But there were other issues in 1928 as well.
Herbert Hoover was a progressive Republican in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt. He had a brilliant record heading American relief efforts to Europe during and after World War I. That record and the economic boom of the 1920s would have easily let the GOP elect Hoover on his own merits. But the bigots couldn’t let well enough alone, hurling filth at Smith and his fellow “papists.”
When Hoover crushed Smith in a landslide, comedians joked the desolate Happy Warrior sent a one-word telegram to the Pope: “Unpack.”
Thirty two years later, Kennedy confronted bigotry head-on in his famous speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association: I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.
That speech reassured Protestants that they could vote for Kennedy. Meanwhile, Catholics who had been trending toward the Republicans ever since Dwight Eisenhower, were moved by the memory of 1928 to stick with their co-religionist. JFK beat Richard Nixon in a squeaker.
Comes now Barack Obama, the frontrunner in most polls. But voters with long memories worry about the “Bradley effect.”
When former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley ran for governor of California in 1982, polls showed him winning but he lost to George Deukmejian by about 100,000 votes, 1.2 percent of the 7.5 million votes cast.
New York Mayor David Dinkins and Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder later had similar, though happier, experiences. Polls showed both men winning handily while in fact they barely squeaked into office. Such results led analysts to speculate that white voters aren’t always honest to pollsters about their willingness to vote for a black candidate.
Besides being the year when anti-Catholicism went into the dustbin of history, 1960 is also a rough index to voter attitudes on race. People born after that date mostly went to integrated schools and today, they mix with blacks, Latinos, gays and the other flavors of the American Potpourri far more easily than citizens of my generation, who grew up when segregation and racism were still seen as a cultural norm.
If such post-racial attitudes prevail, the 1957 Chrysler slogan, “Suddenly, it’s 1960, 1960 is here today” will bring that “Forward Look” to the White House in 2008.
But if hidden racism belies Obama’s rosy poll numbers, we may yet set our watches back to 1928.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen @denverpost.com) is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
