To borrow a description from Barack Obama's beloved basketball, it's now clear that the president is the rhetorical equivalent of a "money player."
Among pros, like the ones currently contesting the NBA championship, this is the kind of competitor who steps up and delivers in the big games. Obama did that twice during his campaign -- once during the primaries, when he had to address his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and again coming out of the Denver convention, when he had to set the tone for his national race.
He did it again Sunday at Notre Dame, where he scored vital points from every place on the floor. John Kenneth Galbraith once remarked that the one thing all the great leaders of his lifetime had in common was their willingness to speak directly to the great popular anxieties of their era. Obama's rhetorical success as a leader derives not simply from his measured eloquence but from his willingness to do precisely that.
The commencement address at Notre Dame had become an engine of controversy because a tiny minority of America's more than 67 million Catholics and a handful of their bishops (70 out of the 440 in the U.S. hierarchy) objected to the university conferring an honorary degree -- customary for commencement speakers -- on a pro-choice politician. It's routine to refer to these Catholics as "conservatives," though that term is relatively meaningless in the context of the American church. Essentially, they're reductionists, who insist on bringing the broad sweep of Catholic social morality down to a single issue -- abortion. In doing so, they are bent on forcing members of the church into the Republican Party.
Obama negotiated the situation with remarkable ease. He echoed the call by Notre Dame's president, Father John Jenkins, that both sides in the abortion debate cease "demonizing" the other while forthrightly admitting that the differences between the two may be, on the most fundamental level, irreconcilable.
The president then evoked two names of extraordinary resonance among Catholics. One was the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, who believed that a genuine pro-life stance included not only opposition to abortion and euthanasia but also opposition to capital punishment and support for decent wages and healthcare for families.
