That led to my personal low moment of the season, watching Baker chew out reporters after the game. “I know you still have faith in Shawon Dunston,” one began gently. But the short-fused manager, his energy and patience drained by prostate cancer surgery six months earlier, cut him off. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t keep playing him! I hear people saying, ‘Dusty’s so loyal, Shawon’s your boy.’ I hear all that shit. But he can do it. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t keep running him out there.” The post-game press conference broke up shortly thereafter, and so did the Giants, or so I thought. You saw it on TV, a week or so later, after the team dropped two out of three to the sad Baltimore Orioles: The Thrilla in San Diego, the Rumble in the Dugout. Barry Bonds had Jeff Kent by the throat, team trainer Stan Conte was holding back none other than Baker himself, and if you thought you’d tuned into the WWE instead of ESPN, you had company. This was a team in free fall.

Fast forward to the League Championship Series victory against the St. Louis Cardinals: Bonds and Kent are hugging, not hating. A resurgent J.T. Snow, batting .282 in the playoffs with several crucial hits, vied with catcher Benito Santiago (another has-been revived by Baker; more on him later) for Most Valuable Player. Shawon Dunston had a clutch hit during a ninth inning two-out rally in the final game, setting up the gritty game-winning single by Kenny Lofton, another Giants’ retread. Baker outmanaged his mentor Tony La Russa, the only other guy to win three Manager of the Year awards, and the Giants were going to Disneyland for a World Series against the Anaheim Angels. While Baker, Snow and Dunston were drinking champagne, Krueger and their other critics had to eat some crow. “Look, managers have good and bad years, and Dusty’s had a very good year,” Krueger told me after the big win. There is a God.

But the doubters haven’t disappeared entirely. In fact, while most baseball analysts say the Giants and Angels, both wild card winners, are amazingly evenly matched, most give the edge to the Angels anyway — even though, in category after category, it’s the Giants who have the statistical and psychological advantage. And I don’t get it.

In other years, I’d have written that off as East Coast media bias. They’re all in bed in Bristol, Conn. by the time many Giants games are over, so some team highlights don’t even make it onto ESPN. But the Angels play three time zones away, too, so that won’t explain it. And it’s not that the Angels have fared better in postseason play, one of the so-called “intangibles” that can give one of two evenly matched teams the edge. While the Giants haven’t won a World Series since 1954, they’ve been there twice since then, in 1962 and 1989, and five Giants players have World Series experience with other teams. This is the Angels’ first trip in their 42-year history, and nobody on their roster has World Series experience.

Which is not to say the Angels aren’t a great team. They’re fantastic, a lot like the Giants, in fact. Both teams put themselves in holes during the first half of the season, and fought back like champions. Neither team could really afford to lose a single game in September, and when it counted most, neither did.

I think the Angels bandwagon, though, is mostly powered by two things: The historic sense that the Giants choke in the spotlight, and the media’s lessened but still significant dislike for Barry Bonds. The Bonds factor alone should give the Giants the edge in any close matchup. He spooked La Russa and the Atlanta Braves’ Bobby Cox, taking the two best managers in the National League behind Baker completely out of their games. But instead the Bonds factor seems to work the other way in the analysts’ minds: it translates into their overestimating, and maybe subconsciously pulling for, their opponents.

That anti-Giants, anti-Bonds prejudice was not at all subconscious in a juvenile Jeff Pearlman column on CNNSI.com this week, which judged the Giants’ victory over the Cardinals final proof that “There is no God.” Pearlman’s evidence? That Bonds and Lofton, whom he depicts as an arrogant asshole and a lowlife thug, respectively, are going to the World Series, and the team of Darryl Kile and Jack Buck are not.

There was nothing juvenile or even hostile to the Sporting News’ Ken Rosenthal’s column giving the nod to the Angels. There was nothing to it, period. He walked through all the reasons smart baseball folks think the Giants have the edge, and then picked the Angels anyway. Why? “My head tells me the Giants, but my heart tells me the Angels,” he wrote.

No matter. The motto of Dusty Baker’s team is, “We don’t start nothin’, but we don’t take nothin’ either.” The disrespect will rile them up a little, while the natural advantages the analysts ignore make them the favorites on the field. My head tells me the Giants, and my heart tells me the Giants, too. Here’s why.

First of all, the 2002 Giants aren’t underdogs anymore. They’ve got some top dogs: three starting All-Stars from 2001 in Bonds (last year’s MVP and certain to be this year’s too), 2000 MVP Jeff Kent, who hit .317 with 37 HRs this year, and shortstop Rich Aurilia, whose 2002 season didn’t match 2001 (.324, 37 HRs) because he was injured, but whose bat came alive against the Cardinals. This isn’t the 1997 team, on which Kent hadn’t proven himself, Aurilia was a green backup shortstop, Bonds was great but still a mere mortal, and the season hinged on the heroics of journeyman catcher Brian Johnson, a truly great guy who’s not even in the major leagues anymore.

Still, beyond Bonds and Kent, every Giants hitter hovered around .250 this season — but that’s what makes the team easy, and dangerous, to underestimate. Key Giants hitters — especially Snow, Aurilia and Santiago, who finished with a .280 average — surged as the season ended. Even at the bottom of the order there’s menace: third baseman David Bell, who hits eighth, clubbed 20 home runs with 73 RBIs and was clutch with men in scoring position. Right fielder Reggie Sanders, who hits seventh, was a disappointment after his great 2001 season with Arizona, but he still wound up with 23 home runs and 85 RBIs, and all I can say is he’s due. (If he wakes up from his dismal postseason slump, it’s Giants in five.) So while the Angels have the edge at a few posts in the starting eight — clearly at right field with Tim Salmon, and maybe at center with Darin Erstad (over Lofton) and third with Troy Glaus (over Bell) — the Bonds factor alone gives them the overall advantage. Walk him or pitch to him, he’s on base most of the time either way.

Likewise in starting pitching, most people judge the Giants better equipped, with four guys who could be Baker’s first starter in any given playoff. In fact, he’s used three: Russ Ortiz against Atlanta, Kirk Rueter against St. Louis and now Jason Schmidt against the Angels. That leaves Livan Hernandez — who looked dreadful many times during the regular season, but has come on and is unbeaten in eight postseason starts — to start Games 3 and 7. The Angels probably have an edge in the bullpen, but I can’t even roll over on that one, now that Felix Rodriguez and his 97 mph heat has returned to 2001 form. For the sake of argument, though, let’s give the bullpen to the Angels — and remember the Braves had the best bullpen in the National League, and it couldn’t help them once their starters were clubbed by the Giants.

The only hands-down advantage the Angels have is at the designated hitter spot, though the Giants starting pitchers kick the butts of the Angels when they have to bat in San Francisco. Then there’s the manager’s spot, where inexplicably, lots of analysts are calling it a tossup, even though Baker has 10 years, three trips to the postseason and three Manager of the Year awards, to the talented Mike Scoscia’s three years and zip in the awards and postseason category, until now. I’ve spent too much time singing Baker’s praises over the years to bother with it here. He doesn’t need me. Let’s just say ESPN’s Joe Morgan calls him the best manager in baseball, and gives the nod to the Giants. Enough said.

Then, of course, there are the intangibles. Everybody knows about Baker’s cancer, but another thing that has held this fractious team together is the presence of two amazing old players. The first is Benito Santiago, the onetime Rookie of the Year who admits he squandered years of his prodigious talent on bad baseball decisions and some partying. In January 1998 Santiago had a catastrophic auto accident that seemed certain to end his baseball career, if not his life (the Web site Stiffs.com tracked him on its “sickticker” for days, waiting to add him to its database of the celebrity dead). Instead, Santiago jumped back onto a baseball roster, bouncing from the Blue Jays in 1998 to the Chicago Cubs in 1999 to the Cincinnati Reds in 2000, until he found himself without a team well into spring training 2001. That’s when an old buddy of Baker’s, Dodgers catcher turned Miami gym-owner Paul Casanova, phoned the Giants manager after watching Santiago train and told him, “Benny’s ready.” The Giants picked up the Carlos Santana lookalike, and he picked up the team, coming into his own in 2002 with trips to the All Star Game, a playoff MVP trophy and now his first World Series at age 37.

But my favorite story is Shawon Dunston. He was an All-Star shortstop with the Chicago Cubs who couldn’t get over not playing every day once his body, inevitably, declined. He credits Baker for the tough love that taught him to adjust to being a role player, not a starter. “He took me aside and he told me, ‘OK, you were an All-Star. But you ain’t no Hall of Famer. You ain’t God’s gift to baseball.” Years later Dunston still looks sucker-punched as he tells the story. But after sulking briefly, Dunston said, he came around. It still hurts that he’s mostly on the bench — when I talked to him midseason, he said it was painful hearing the calls for him to retire “when I still know I can play.”

Yet Baker endured the heat for keeping him on the roster for a reason besides loyalty: Dunston’s an unrivalled clubhouse leader, the only guy who can clown around as an equal with both Bonds and Kent, who still aren’t buddies. He was the first guy to soak the aloof Bonds with champagne after the division series win. But my favorite Dunston memory, before the final championship game, came in April, when I watched him clowning around with Kent in the dugout while most teammates were still being frosty to him, after he broke his wrist doing wheelies on his motorcycle and lied about it, and started the season on the disabled list. Clowning with Dunston began Kent’s slow rehabilitation with his teammates, which still isn’t complete. (If Kent gets hot in the playoffs, it’s Giants in four.) Now Dunston’s going to the World Series for the first time, at 39, and his teammates will happily pay his World Series share even if he doesn’t get another hit.

Yet the doubters still carp about Baker’s tendency to stick with guys like Dunston. “Dusty likes to champion the underdog, which is an admirable trait, but it loses you games,” says Larry Krueger. Clearly, Baker’s well-documented affinity for the underdog (which hasn’t been on display much this year anyway) hasn’t kept him from winning plenty: The Giants are second in wins to only the Atlanta Braves during his 10 years at the helm; he has 7 stirring victories in 10 postseason games this October.

But I’ve thought some about this underdog issue, too. If you always identify with the underdog — as Baker does, as I do — can you ever be the top dog? Even beyond Baker, is there something about the Giants’ long tradition of losing — they haven’t won a World Series since 1954, and before that it was 1933 — that sets them up for more losing? Honestly, the only place I think the Angels might have an edge over the Giants is when it comes to fans. Sure, we pack Pac Bell Park. But we always expect the worst. Closer Robb Nen will blow the save! Dunston will strike out! Dusty yanked the starting pitcher too early/too late. Does anybody really believe this team can win its first World Series in San Francisco, their first in 48 years?

I do. And at long last, so do virtually all Giants fans. This is the year they throw it all off, and become the underdogs who play like top dogs. Just watch. It’ll be Giants in six. (My head says seven, but my heart can’t take the stress.)

I needn’t have soft-pedaled. Only a few hours later the bishops came out, guns blazing, insisting the only solution they would accept would be for “HHS to rescind the mandate for those objectionable services.” By any employer, for any employee in the entire country — a country where the vast majority of voters, and of Catholics, support Obama’s stand. And at Sunday Mass, bishops and parish priests throughout the nation read aloud the stunningly political letters about the controversy they already had planned. Now, with the bishops’ blessing, Republican are hard at work on legislation that would force HHS to strip the contraceptive coverage requirement for all employers, not just religious employers. Sen. Roy Blunt would allow employers to decline to cover any service they deem objectionable; Sen. Marco Rubio would restrict the legislation to contraception coverage.

I have a couple of reactions to the bishops’ extremism. First of all, as someone raised Catholic, I wonder why they’ve never read letters about any of their social justice priorities: universal healthcare, increased protection for the poor, labor rights, or action to curb climate change? Why does this topic  – not even the morally challenging issue of abortion, but the universally accepted practice of birth control – merit such a thundering reaction from the pulpit?

Second, as an American, I also wonder: How do they continue to demand tax-exempt status when they’re railing in their churches about blatantly political – and divisively partisan – public concerns? As the first writer on my remarkably sane Catholic tribalism letters thread remarked, their public support for the extremist GOP position makes me think they should register as a Republican political action committee rather than remain a tax-exempt religious institution outside the bounds of politics.

Even as the bishops became more shrill and extreme, the debate over contraception coverage became smarter and calmer last week. Major Catholic organizations supported Obama’s Friday move, including the Catholic Health Association, Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and Catholic Charities USA. Before the president’s announcement, famed attorney David Boies did the most to usher in the new tone by framing the HHS rules as a matter of labor law. Boies doesn’t believe, by the way, that HHS is in any way required to provide the exemption for churches it wrote into its regulations even before the compromise. If the church is employing people, whether co-religionists or not, it has a responsibility to comply with employment law. He proved that even the administration’s initial regulations, exempting churches, was a strong attempt at accommodating anti-contraceptive religious groups.

But maybe the best argument on behalf of the Obama administration’s position comes from a very unlikely source, as Jay Bookman points out: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In two different decisions, the conservative Catholic Scalia has sided with the court majority in finding that religious teachings can’t justify religious employers – or employees — failing to comply with labor law. In the 1990 Employment Division v. Smith decision, regarding an employer’s ability to fire a Native American employee who used peyote, despite the employee’s claim that using the drug was a religious rite, Scalia wrote:

“We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition.” In an even more directly relevant 1982 decision holding that Amish employers must comply with Social Security and withholding taxes, though their faith bars participation in government support programs, Scalia wrote:

Respondents urge us to hold, quite simply, that when otherwise prohibitable conduct is accompanied by religious convictions, not only the convictions but the conduct itself must be free from governmental regulation. We have never held that, and decline to do so now.

I’ve written repeatedly that my inability to quit the Catholic Church entirely comes from the fact that its social teachings formed my social conscience, and to this day some of the people doing the most good for the poor and the excluded are devout Catholics. But the bishops are impossible to defend. Today, they are working on behalf of the Republican Party. “They have become the Pharisees,” says Andrew Sullivan, a conservative practicing Catholic. “And we need Jesus.”

I’ll be discussing the bishops’ GOP politicking on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 pm ET.

But the new agreement makes it possible for women’s groups and some liberal Catholic leaders to maintain a truce on hot-button social issues while working together around issues of women’s health and universal access to healthcare. Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America are happy with the solution, and so is Sister Carol Keehan of the Catholic Health Association, who endured withering heat from the bishops and their right-wing allies over the ACA. Kristen Day of Feminists for Life likewise backs the deal. Even New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan called it “a step in the right direction,” though he demanded more time to examine the fine print and suggested “legislation will still be required” to protect the church’s right to discriminate against women.

The bishops and the entire 2012 GOP field will continue to fight their culture wars, but the White House apparently believes the non-compromise will win them the middle ground and make the 24-7 cable news show wailing and hand-wringing – even by some liberals – go away. We’ll see.

But what just happened? Why did we spend 10 days listening to prominent Catholics, including even some liberals and Democrats, insist that the White House had overreached and trampled on “religious freedom” – in this case, the “freedom” of the Catholic hierarchy to impose rules that even most Catholics don’t live by?  The great E.J. Dionne led the charge, but Catholic Democrats like Sens. John Kerry and Bob Case and Virginia’s Tim Kaine joined in, and occasionally, liberal TV hosts like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Matthews seemed inclined to depict the controversy as being about the church’s right not to violate its own values. Vice President Joe Biden was said to be the leading voice within the administration warning Obama away from the issue.

“This has struck a tribal nerve in Catholicism,” conservative Catholic scholar George Weigel said to Chuck Todd on “The Daily Rundown” last Monday. “The Catholic Church has been beaten up over the last 10 or 11 years and I think Catholics are tired of the government and others beating up on the church.” His liberal co-religionist on the panel, E.J. Dionne, agreed. I found that fascinating, especially because most of us consider tribalism a bad thing in a multi-ethnic democracy.

Still, while I didn’t share that reaction, I recognized it. It amazes me sometimes, the extent to which Catholics still see themselves – ourselves — as outsiders. There’s a vestigial impulse to circle the wagons and protect our right to practice our persecuted religion (even if it’s no longer persecuted, and many of us don’t practice very much of it anymore). Where does it come from? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this lately, because the importance of Catholics to the old New Deal coalition, and their ongoing status as key swing-voters in key swing states, makes understanding them – us – important. This same old tribalism leaves many Catholics receptive to GOP blathering about out-of-touch “elites” who supposedly disrespect their religious freedom. It helped shift many white working-class Catholics to the Republican Party in the ’60s and ’70s.

There may be an element of remorse involved when liberal Catholics defend their faith, especially among those who defy the church (rightly, in my opinion) on its most blinkered teachings in the realm of women’s rights, gay rights and sexuality. For some it may be guilt: OK, I might not listen to the bishops, but I think we ought to demand that they’re respected in the public sphere. And for some it may be grief: We grew up with a rich tradition of social responsibility and spiritual meaning that’s unfortunately been warped by leaders who worship worldly power and have odd views about sex as well as women. While the child abuse scandal makes most Catholics sick, sometimes even I wince when non-Catholics judge the whole church by the corruption of a comparative (though very powerful) few.  I have cousins and uncles and aunts who’ve joined religious orders (though, truthfully, most of them left). I don’t like seeing all of them considered perverts or pedophiles, or people who cover up for predators.

How Catholics work out their complex feelings about the church matters beyond the tribe, if only because they’re crucial to the 2012 election. One in four voters is Catholic, and Obama won a majority in 2008, while Republicans won them back in 2010. Obama lost white Catholics, however, although he won among those who say they aren’t regular churchgoers.  I think Catholics remain an important, not always predictable constituency at least partly because of their own unresolved, unpredictable feelings about their religion, and their status as Americans.

I found myself thinking a lot about my own complicated feelings about my heritage as I watched Catholics grapple, not always rationally, with the contraceptive controversy. Even when I didn’t agree, I empathized.

- – - – - -

I grew up in a huge Irish Catholic clan on Long Island, but as an adult, I put away childish things (in the words of St. Paul, though not as he intended them) and became a secular feminist liberal Democrat. The first time I remember feeling anything like tribalism was after Sept. 11.

Many liberals around me criticized the overt religiosity of the public mourning for those killed that day, all that talk about God, which struck me as reflexively and needlessly anti-religion at a time when many Americans — dare I say most — found comfort in their faith. Then, after a benefit for survivors’ families turned a little rowdy, with one cop taking to the stage to say “Osama bin Laden can kiss my royal Irish ass,” the heavily Irish and Catholic cops and firefighters in attendance were roundly derided as right-wing tribalist rubes. That bothered me, too: Who did we think died trying to rescue those trapped in the World Trade Center, Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore? Members of my own family had worked in the rescue operation after the towers fell. I wasn’t down with the mockery.

A lot of my belated tribalism was a class thing: I’m not workin-class, but my parents and aunts and uncles were, and some of my cousins are still part of that ill-defined and disappearing demographic. There’s clearly an element of snobbery in the way the white working class is routinely run down as backward, racist, narrow-minded yahoos, and I’ve grown to resent it.

Yet in general, Catholics are doing pretty well for themselves. We’re well represented in certain segments of the American elite, especially elite punditry, it seems.  It’s understandably hard for some people to imagine, in a world so striated by race and class, how Catholics could feel like oppressed outsiders. Yet it’s also true that while we’ve only elected one black president, we’ve only elected one Catholic president as well. I’m not trying to equate the struggles of black people and Catholics. In fact, it’s especially when you understand how relatively privileged Catholics have been, compared to African-Americans, that having only one Catholic president stands out, and makes you wonder: Why?

It’s hard not to conclude that some residue of the religious nativism that persecuted and stigmatized Catholics in the 19thcentury, defeated Al Smith in 1928, and forced John F. Kennedy to promise he wouldn’t take orders from the pope in 1960 persists to this day. So even if we haven’t personally experienced anti-Catholic prejudice, and I can’t say I have, there’s an atavistic memory, something bred in the bone, that forces many of us to defend our once-persecuted church, even when we profoundly disagree with it.

But it wasn’t until I debated the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins on “Hardball” this week that the craziness of the right-wing Catholic alliance with conservative evangelicals became particularly obvious to me. They’ve locked arms with some of the very forces that once persecuted their ancestors – some of whom still despise Catholicism to this day. On “Hardball,” Perkins posed as a defender of the Catholic bishops’ position on Obama’s contraception rules. But he’s also been an ally to virulent anti-Catholics like Rev. John Hagee, who called the church “the great whore” and a “false cult.” And Rev. Robert Jeffress, who likened the church to Satan and labeled Catholicism a “fake religion.” Like Zionist Jews who’ve made common cause with right-wing evangelicals over Israel, some Catholics are lining up, in the name of religious freedom, alongside folks who want to wipe out their religion. I’ve heard some liberals express disdain for some of the church’s teachings, but I’ve never heard anyone compare it to Satan or call it a whore.

Zealous right-wing Catholics are in the minority, even if blowhards like Bill Donohue sometimes make the most noise. In the end, I think the contraceptive flap forced a lot of Catholics to reckon with the gulf between what they practice and what their church preaches.  The truth was always there, if we wanted to find it, not merely in polling data that said 98 percent of sexually active Catholics have used birth control, but that solid majorities of Catholic voters supported Obama’s contraception regulations applying to large Catholic institutions, like hospitals, charities and universities, that employ non-Catholics. I loved the fact that students at Catholic universities held a press conference Thursday to support the president, and that organizations like Catholic Democrats and Catholics for Choice were active and vocal in standing up to their own bishops.

There are a lot of outstanding questions about the implementation of the administration’s non-compromise. But I have to disagree with Esquire’s Charles Pierce – I’m not sure that’s ever happened before – and say I don’t consider this any kind of cave on the president’s part or victory for the bishops. I prefer the interpretation of Frances Kissling, founder of Catholics for Choice, who wrote on Friday that the “accommodation” made the bishops the “losers” and women the winners. ”When the White House cares more about what a simple Catholic sister, [Sister Carol Keehan], thinks than about what the bishops think, Catholic women can applaud. Perhaps the crack in the patriarchy is becoming a deep canyon.”

I can’t go that far – especially after seeing this Think Progress report that documented what we all knew: that men dominated the debate over the controversy on cable news. It’s also a little sobering that so many of the liberal Catholic voices questioning the president were male, while most of the liberal voices backing him were female. But between this and the victory for Planned Parenthood in the Komen mess a week ago, I see evidence that we’re reaching a new place in the battle over gender. At the very least, being a woman is no longer a preexisting condition, as the Catholic Nancy Pelosi likes to say.

I’ve tried to make the same points: What if Catholics didn’t believe in child labor laws? Would we let church-run agencies flout them? Boies used the example of a religion that believed people shouldn’t work after age 60: Could they legally ban older people from employment? Of course, they could do neither. This is indeed an issue of religious freedom: the freedom of non-Catholics not to be bound by the dictates of the Catholic Church in the workplace.

But Boies, fresh off his 9th Circuit victory defending gay marriage, brought the legal knowledge. Watch below.

Of course, the very same night, the re-surging Rick Santorum offered the most shrill and hysterical reaction to the White House ruling, and in a week of shrillness and hysteria, that’s saying a lot. Santorum actually said that President Obama’s contraception ruling meant we are “headed down [the] road” to the French Revolution and the “guillotine.” That’s below, too.

If you watch the entire seven-minute clip, you’ll understand why, despite Santorum’s latest surge, I do not believe that even today’s Republican Party, though it’s been hijacked by the ultra-right, is capable of nominating him for president. Like so many right-wingers, he absolutely mangles what the Founders believed about religion. He says one problem with the French Revolution is that its slogan of “liberty, equality and fraternity” substituted fraternity, or “brotherhood,” for “fatherhood,” a reference to God the father, but also his right-wing belief in the centrality of male control to family and national stability. But his absolute craziness is best displayed in his remarks about the guillotine:

They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.

Although Santorum said we’re “a long way from that,” he insisted that with the Obama presidency “we are headed down that road.” But watch the whole thing. Boies first, then Santorum. Reason before crazy. I’ll be talking about all of this on MSNBC’s “Hardball” today at 5 p.m. ET.

Reason:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now crazy (h/t Crooks & Liars):

Predictably, the GOP presidential candidates are whacking Obama on the issue; fittingly, Rick Santorum is surging again, as this latest battle in the culture war rages. As always, the biggest hypocrite is  Mitt Romney, who is attacking the president’s decision even though he went along with the same regulations in Massachusetts. And when the state enacted the universal health insurance law he used to be proud of, it covered the same “family planning services” as the new HHS regulations.

I knew the president’s decision would be controversial, but I underestimated the firestorm he would face. Since 98 percent of Catholics practice forms of contraception forbidden by the church at some point in their lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control, I assumed many of them would speak out in favor of the new regulations. How could they expect the president to follow church teachings if they did not?

I was wrong. Too many Catholics are insisting that while they may personally disagree with the church on contraception, they defend the bishops’ opposition to the HHS moves as a matter of “religious liberty.” Others are silent. But silence lets the most right-wing forces of reaction prevail. It’s time for the 98 percent to speak up.

This is indeed a matter of religious liberty – the liberty of non-Catholic women who work for Catholic employers to have the full spectrum of healthcare coverage, regardless of what the church believes.

Twenty-eight states already require church-run agencies to cover contraception in the health insurance they provide employees. Catholic Charities sued to oppose the regulation in New York, and lost. The world didn’t end; Catholic agencies in New York and those 27 other states now cover contraception. And they should: Women who have access to family planning services have lower infant mortality rates and healthier babies than those who don’t. Others take the birth control pill to deal with endometriosis or other reproductive system issues. Contraception has to be part of comprehensive healthcare for women.

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod left the door open to a compromise with the bishops. That sounded dangerous. The worst move for the administration would be to take a courageous stand, rile up the right wing and Catholic bishops, and then cave and demoralize the women’s health advocates who are mobilizing to support the president. Later on “Daily Rundown” liberal Catholic E.J. Dionne suggested possibilities for compromise on the issue, while ultra-conservative George Weigel shot him down. There will be no “compromise” that leaves everyone happy. Either this is a matter of equity and the right approach to women’s health, or it’s not. And Catholics who ignore the church’s teaching on this issue have a special duty to speak up.

Karl Rove heard echoes of Obama’s rhetoric too, and implicit optimism about the direction of the country, and cried foul.

“I was, frankly, offended by it,” Rove said on Fox News Monday. “I’m a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.”

Rove wasn’t the only Republican who tried to cast the Chrysler ad as essentially payback to the president for supporting the bailout that kept the domestic auto industry alive. Michelle Malkin tweeted her horror Sunday night: “Agh. WTH? Did I just see Clint Eastwood fronting an auto bailout ad???”

Now, Clint Eastwood is no Democrat – he voted for John McCain in 2008, has been a Republican for most of his life, and now describes himself as having “libertarian” leanings. It’s hard to imagine he’d lend his name to an openly and intentionally pro-Obama ad. Chrysler has denied any political motive behind the Eastwood ad.

The flap over the ad confirms the GOP’s serious branding problem: The problem for Rove and the rest of the GOP is that their party’s narrative has become relentlessly negative, pessimistic and uninspiring. They’ve left the language of optimism and resilience, higher ground and common ground, to the Democrats, and lately President Obama has grabbed every opportunity to employ that language.

Rove is essentially complaining that anyone using rhetoric of resilience and tenacity, or suggests “we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one” sounds like a gosh-darn … Democrat.  That’s good news for Democrats. There’s more good news in recent polls showing that Obama is winning back at least some white working-class voters with his feistier message of economic populism. The president’s approval/disapproval ratings have been dismal with whites who make less than $50,000, with his approval dropping into the low 30s and disapproval up in the mid-60s regularly over the last two years.

Now those numbers stand at 43-54, about where they were when Obama was elected. He may not carry that cohort, but holding the share he had in 2008 will make his reelection chances much better. There’s also good news with those same voters in some Rust Belt states, including Wisconsin, Ohio and, yes, Michigan, home of Chrysler.

Karl Rove is angry because he sees the numbers, too, and he’s got to explain them away with dark allusions to “Chicago politics.” But the fact is the president saved the auto industry at a time when Republicans, most notably Mitt Romney, urged him to let it die. If he gets credit for that unpopular decision, that’s because he deserves it.

And if Clint Eastwood sounds like a Democrat when he talks about American ingenuity and optimism, that’s because increasingly it’s Democrats who sound that way – and Republicans who don’t. Ronald Reagan co-opted buoyancy and hopefulness for a generation, painting Democrats from Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis through Al Gore and John Kerry (with a break for Bill Clinton) as Negative Nellies, whiners and complainers always finding fault with America.

Now it’s Republicans who bad-mouth the American people, warning that lax morals and laziness are behind the problems of the poor and working class (including whites), and who paint scary dystopic pictures of America under its Kenyan anti-colonialist socialist black president. Karl Rove’s hissy fit over the Chrysler ad underscores exactly how bleak his party’s vision has become.

I’ll be on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 p.m. ET to discuss Rove and the angry GOP.