I’ve been remiss on not pointing out some good stuff being written by Mark Stricherz.

First is a post on his blog "What happened to the great Catholic pols?"

But today the maternity ward for great Catholic pols seems to have closed down. What Catholic America has bred instead are a host of lesser types of politicians. Some are influential but neither powerful nor particularly moral–House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Rep. Mike Castle, and Sen. Susan Collins. Others are influential and moral but not particularly powerful–Rep. Chris Smith, Bob Casey, Sen. Rick Santorum, and Sen. Sam Brownback. And still others–well, only one, former Rep. Tim Roemer–right now have only the capacity for greatness.

The absence of such pols is an anomaly. Catholic America continues to produce greats in other lines of work. There are excellent Catholic judges; four of them sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. There are fine Catholic businessmen–Peter Lynch and Tom Monaghan. There are first-rate Catholic artists–Francis Ford Coppola comes to mind. There are fine Catholic thinkers–Cardinal Avery Dulles, Ralph McInerny, Robert George, and on his best days, Garry Wills. And there are boatloads of great Catholic athletic coaches–Mike Krzyzsewski, Joe Torre, and my old high-school religion teacher, Bob Ladoceur.

But there are no great Catholic pols. By this I mean politicians who combine morality, pragmatism, toughness, and creativity.

He offers some reasons, and they’re good ones, but honestly, don’t you think the bigger question is, Where are the great pols? Period.

And this, from the March issue of Crisis, on polls and Roe v. Wade:

The answers matter in ways you might not expect. In recent decades even the Supreme Court has misread poll results. In Becoming Justice Blackmun, a 2005 biography of the author of the Roe decision, New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse revealed that Blackmun—while doing his research in the summer of 1972—consulted Gallup polls about public attitudes on abortion.

If the justices do scrutinize the polls, they might be in for a shock. Most Americans oppose the lax abortion standards laid out not just in Roe v. Wade, but in its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, as well as the 1992 decision that modified Roe, Casey v. Planned Parenthood. (This isn’t to say that most Americans favor overturning those decisions—the public appears evenly split on the matter.)

The fact is that the vast majority of media polling on Roe v. Wade is deeply flawed in its confusion over what the Supreme Court actually permitted under Roe and Doe (and later Casey). And that’s why the two sets of polls recorded dramatically different results.

Stricherz, like our friend MIchael Sean Winters, is working on a book on Catholics and the Democratic party.  Isn’t it nice to be popular?