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Bill Berkowitz
October 19, 2006

Faith-based confidential

A new book from administration insider confirms faith-based initiative is little more than political-religious patronage system

Oddly enough, the high point of President Bush's faith-based initiative may have come on the day it was announced, shortly after his inauguration in 2000. Bush, surrounded by a host of smiling religious leaders, triumphantly launched the White House Office on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives -- the centerpiece of the president's domestic agenda.

From that day until the present, the initiative has been mired in controversy: Many Republicans were dissatisfied with the appointment of John DiIulio, nominally a Democrat, to be the first head of the White House Office; a number of religious right leaders withheld their support for the initiative over concerns that organizations such as the Nation of Islam or the Church of Scientology might wind up receiving government money; the Washington Post revealed that the White House had been holding secret meetings with the Salvation Army aimed at doing an end run around civil rights hiring laws; DiIulio resigned in disgust after a short time in office; the administration over-hyped a report that found religious organizations were being discriminated against by the government; Congress failed to pass a comprehensive faith-based legislative package forcing Bush to resort to a series of executive orders to carry out certain aspects of the program; church/state separation advocates began winning significant court victories against the initiative; a GAO report found that there were no significant procedures in place to hold recipients of government grants accountable for how they were using the money; the only major study showing that faith-based organizations performed better that secular groups was found to have distorted the data.

'Tempting faith'

Now, David Kuo, the former second-in-command of the White House Office and a true believer in the power of faith-based organizations to help the poor, has published a new book titled "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," which provides an insiders look at how the Bush White House politicized the initiative, sometime rejected applications for federal faith-based funds because they came from non-Christian applicants, mocked leaders of the Christian Right, and betrayed the very essence of the faith-based initiative's charge to help the poor.

According to Jonathan Larsen, a producer with MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," "Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly 'nonpartisan' events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races."

"Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans," Kuo reports. The outreach was so extensive and so powerful in motivating not just conservative evangelicals, but also traditionally Democratic minorities, that Kuo attributes Bush's 2004 Ohio victory "at least partially ... to the conferences we had launched two years before."

"With the exception of one reporter from the Washington Post, Kuo says the media were oblivious to the political nature and impact of his office's events, in part because so much of the debate centered on issues of separation of church and state."

While the charges in Kuo's book may be shocking to most of the "oblivious" media, organizations that have been consistently monitoring the faith-based initiative from the very beginning weren't surprised. According to Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (Americans United), his group became aware of the politicization of the faith-based initiative as far back as 2002.

In Lynn's new book, "Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom," published earlier this month, Lynn writes, "James Towey, until recently the head of the White House faith-based office, denies there is a political dimension to the initiative. Unfortunately for Towey, there is and he's up to his neck in it. In 2002 and 2004 Towey made a series of campaign appearances alongside Republican congressional and gubernatorial candidates whom polls showed were locked in tight races."

Lynn's information is in part gleaned from an October 2002 story in Americans United's Church & State magazine. Titled "Faith-Based Flimflam," the story documented how the Republican Party was using the initiative to bring more religious voters to the party.

While the administration continues to advocate for the faith-based initiative, it does so while quietly concentrating on partisan political goals in the 2002 election. In fact, Bush's White House seems especially focused on using the larger endeavor as part of an aggressive outreach effort to African-American voters in competitive political states and districts.

In October 2002, after John DiIulio, the first head of the White House faith-based office, left office, he sent a letter to Esquire Washington correspondent Ron Suskind, who according to the Esquire website, "was a key source of Suskind's story about Karl Rove, politics and policymaking in the Bush administration, "Why Are These Men Laughing," which appear[ed] in the January 2003 issue of Esquire:

"[T]hey basically rejected any idea that the president's best political interests -- not to mention the best policy for the country -- could be served by letting centrist Senate Democrats in on the issue...They winked at the most far-right House Republicans who, in turn, drafted a so-called faith bill (H.R. 7, the Community Solutions Act) that (or so they thought) satisfied certain fundamentalist leaders and beltway libertarians but bore few marks of 'compassionate conservatism' and was, as anybody could tell, an absolute political non-starter. It could pass the House only on a virtual party-line vote, and it could never pass the Senate.

"Not only that," DiIulio continued, "but it reflected neither the president's own previous rhetoric on the idea, nor any of the actual empirical evidence that recommended policies promoting greater public/private partnerships involving community-serving religious organizations. I said so, wrote memos, and so on for the first six weeks. But, hey, what's that fat, out-of-the-loop professor guy know; besides, he says he'll be gone in six months. As one senior staff member chided me at a meeting at which many junior staff were present and all ears, 'John, get a faith bill, any faith bill.'"

Mocked and ridiculed

"National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous,' 'out of control,' and just plain 'goofy,'" Kuo writes in his book.

"You name the important Christian leader, and I have heard them mocked by serious people in serious places," Kuo told CBS Television's "60 Minutes" on Sunday October 16.

Kuo, who left the White House in late 2003 after a brain tumor and subsequent seizure caused him to have a serious car accident, told Leslie Stahl that the mocking included the Rev. Pat Robertson being called "insane," the Rev. Jerry Falwell being called "ridiculous" and comments that Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family "had to be controlled."

James Towey, Kuo's former boss in the faith-based initiative office, denied Kuo's accusations. The book seems to be "describing is kind of a personal animus against evangelicals and a kind of personal insulting behavior," Towey said. "President Bush would never have tolerated that, and I never saw it in four and a half years."

When he was asked about the book, White House press secretary Tony Snow said that he asked Rove about Kuo's charges and, "Karl made the same point I did, which is, 'These are my friends: I don't talk about them like that.'"

As the mid-term elections approach, more and more evangelical Christians appear to be straying -- or are threatening to stray -- from the GOP. If Kuo's charges that White House officials openly ridiculed Christian evangelical leaders is true, it would be one more reason, on top of the Mark Foley scandal, the Abramoff affair, the quagmire in Iraq and general discontent with the GOP, for them to either vote for Democrats, or sit out the election.

Attacking the messenger rather than heeding the message is a longtime staple of both the White House and conservative evangelical Christian organizations. Kuo told "60 Minutes" that he expected to be attacked over the revelations in his book. He suggested that the White House might say that "He's really a liberal," or, "Oh, maybe that brain tumor really messed up his head."

Susan Jones, a Senior Editor with Cybercast News Service, a subsidiary of L. Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, led her story about Kuo's book by saying that "In yet another apparent attempt to suppress the conservative vote in November, a former White House official is out with a new book suggesting that President Bush's top political advisers ridiculed evangelical leaders -- calling them "nuts" and "goofy" behind their backs, while embracing them in public to win votes (as the Los Angeles Times put it)."

Jason T. Christy, publisher of The Church Report magazine, says Kuo's book is "nothing more than the ramblings of a disgruntled former employee looking to sell a few books." In a commentary titled "David Kuo: An Addition to the Axis of Evil," Christy wrote that Kuo is "simply a wolf in sheep's clothing having done campaign work for Democrats and written for liberal web sites."

Days before the book was due to hit the shelves, Focus on the Family's Director of Issue Analysis Carrie Gordon Earll had this to say about Kuo and the book:

The release of this book criticizing the Bush administration's handling of its faith-based initiative program seems to represent little more than a mix of sour grapes and political timing. David Kuo's book doesn't hit shelves until next week, but excerpts released by media outlets paint the picture of a dissatisfied federal employee taking shots at the White House effort to connect faith-based nonprofit groups with legitimate societal needs.

Big media will no doubt play this story to the hilt in the next several weeks, because it allows them to take aim at two of their favorite targets: President Bush and socially conservative Christians. Sadly, Kuo's characterization of his former colleagues, bosses and mission -- mischaracterizations, really -- will be fed to the public as truth.

While Focus on the Family does not participate in the faith-based initiative program, we are allies with many who do -- and they have far different impressions of the people and events documented in Kuo's book. Our support for the program is unchanged, and we applaud the president's hard work in reducing dependency on government programs while connecting people to their communities. It's a commitment that dates back to his time as governor of Texas and one that will be a large and important part of his White House legacy.

Kuo told "60 Minutes" that the "message that has been sent out to Christians for a long time now that Jesus came primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing political agenda -- as if this culture war is a war for God. And it's not a war for God, it's a war for politics. And that's a huge difference."

Although Kuo's book details his disappointment with the president's faith-based initiative, it should be noted that the initiative has taken hold in nearly a dozen government agencies, is rapidly spreading its tentacles to state governments, and has handed out several billion dollars to religious organizations.

See here for extensive excerpts from "Tempting Faith."