Evangelicals shouldn't be surprised by
White House treatment

By John Farmer

"Never give a sucker an even break," W.C. Fields, the comical con man of so many old films, was famous for saying. He'd be right at home in the Bush White House.

For we now have it on fairly good authority that the Bush team, led by Karl Rove, exploited the gullibility of Christian evangelicals to further Republican political ambitions while privately scorning them as "nuts" or "ridiculous" or "boorish" or worse. They mocked and laughed at their Christian shock troops, which is shabbily cynical but understandable.

It must be hard for experienced con artists to feel anything but contempt for the suckers, or the marks as they're known on the street. Indeed, even onlookers feel little sympathy for marks, many of whom, maybe most, get scammed because they're promised something they shouldn't have in the first place.

What the evangelicals wanted from the Bushies was the power to impose a theology-driven order on government policy and the people it hires and appoints. What Rove wanted was to turn evangelical churches across the country into Republican ward clubs. It was the ultimate church-state roll in the hay.

The whistle-blower in this case is David Kuo, former deputy director of the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives in the Bush White House who has written a new book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction."

As Kuo tells it, the evangelical community thought it had it made an alliance with the Bush White House that held evangelicals in high regard, shared their religious fervor, and promised to pump federal money into faith-based institutions.

Actually, it was a cynical relationship from the start, as Kuo now sees it, in which Rove and Co. had contempt for the evangelicals. The Bush crowd "knew the nuts were politically invaluable, but that was the extent of their usefulness," according to Kuo.

He goes on: "Sadly, the political affairs folks complained most often and most loudly about how boorish many politically involved Christians were. ... National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs as `ridiculous' and `out of control.'" "Goofy" was another favorite putdown.

Kuo's motives for blowing the whistle on the Bush team will draw questions. Not so much why he did it --- his sense of having been deceived is clear --- but why he did it now, at the moment of maximum electoral peril for Bush and the GOP. (Most likely a publisher's decision.) Kuo's conservative credentials seem genuine --- he worked for former Attorney General John Ashcroft, a ranking right-winger in the Bush camp. And he's not the first to bail out of Bush's faith-based operation.

John J. DiIulio Jr. quit the Faith-based White House office seven months after his appointment, complaining of "Mayberry Machiavellis," a complaint presumably about political misuse of the faithful.

Evangelicals haven't come away empty-handed from their dalliance with Bush-Rove. But they didn't benefit as much as Bush and the GOP.

They can cite Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and several judicial appointments. But the promised federal ban on homosexual marriage --- a principal goal of evangelicals --- never materialized. Neither did all the money promised to religious charities, Kuo claims.

In fact, some $20 million more was provided for "compassionate social programs" in the Clinton years than ever materialized under Bush, according to Kuo.

Kuo's book, published Monday (Oct. 16), couldn't have arrived at a worse time for Bush and the GOP --- on the heels of the Foley-congressional page scandal, and a year in which Republicans on Capitol Hill were caught in the Abramoff lobbying scandal, former GOP House leader Tom DeLay was indicted and forced to resign, and Republican Congressmen Bob Ney and Randy "Duke" Cunningham were convicted on corruption charges. Evangelicals must be wondering how they ever fell in with such bad companions.

They shouldn't feel too bad, however. They're not alone. "There's a sucker born every minute," as the master entrepreneur P.T. Barnum discovered long ago. He'd have been a star in the Bush White House.

John Farmer is national political correspondent for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.

A story of misplaced faith

By Paul Mulshine

I have long maintained that America was a better place back when the fundamentalist Christians flocked to the Democratic Party. David Kuo's book offers evidence to support that belief.

Kuo is the author of "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction." It tells the story not only of Kuo's rise to the position of special assistant to President Bush for faith-based initiatives but also of the rise of the fundamentalists within the Republican Party.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon. People tend to assume that the religious "right," as it is mistakenly termed, has always been loyal to the GOP. In fact, the Bible Belt was solidly Democratic until relatively recently. The highlight of this era was undoubtedly the infamous 1925 "monkey trial," when the good Democrats of Tennessee put teacher John Scopes on trial for informing the kiddies of the undeniable fact that man is a mammal. Leading the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan, a former presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

Noted conservative curmudgeon H.L. Mencken summarized the situation this way:

"The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life."

As a loyal Republican and a conservative, I look back fondly on the days when such characters infested the Democratic Party. After the 1970s, however, the Democrats became more hospitable to the followers of astrology and shamanism. So the fundamentalists eventually migrated to the GOP.

Kuo traces this migration to the work of Charles Colson, the Nixon aide who found religion in prison after being convicted for his role in Watergate. In 1987, Colson told Kuo that America needed "a restoration of religious values in public life."

That sounds nice. But Christianity is not necessarily compatible with the exercise of political power. Edward Gibbon certainly didn't think so. In his classic "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Gibbon traced the breakup of that great empire to the conversion to Christianity of its political class.

The connection is obvious to any thinking person. Anyone who truly believes in the precepts of Christianity --- such as turning the other cheek --- is going to lack the realism necessary to impose his will on the people of foreign nations. This of course is exactly what happened under George W. Bush with his misconceived notion that the "liberation" of hostile peoples would somehow work to America's advantage.

Meanwhile, the Bush acolytes in the red states are only now waking up to the notion that the liberation of Iraq has led to the persecution of Christians there, and that in liberated Afghanistan, a convert to Christianity can face the death sentence and so on.

In his book --- which is a surprisingly good read, by the way --- Kuo describes how, after graduating from Tufts University, he went to Washington in 1989 and took a job on Ted Kennedy's staff. He reasoned, logically enough, that as a Christian he should commit himself to the service of someone who engaged in Christian behavior, i.e. who gave away a lot of stuff for free.

The Democrats will always be better at this than the Republicans, and that is what gives tension to the narrative. Before long, Kuo had migrated to the Republican Party, within which clever characters like Ralph Reed had begun engineering the final migration of Bible Belt fundamentalists from the party of Bryan. In 1998, Kuo got a call from a rising star in Texas who had a plan to employ the fundamentalist vote as part of his drive for the presidency in 2000. George W. Bush also had a great name and firm ties to the Wall Street wing of the GOP.

It seemed like a good formula, and it was. After Bush won, Kuo was enticed to work at the White House implementing Bush's promises to the faithful. The denouement concerns how Kuo gradually came to discover that Bush had no real intention of funding what presidential svengali Karl Rove once termed that "f--ing faith-based thing."

Though Kuo takes some shots at Rove for failing to fund the programs, he also sympathizes with the tough job Rove has in holding together the coalition that makes up the GOP. So do I. How does one deal with a party that contains, on the one hand, some of the smartest investors and entrepreneurs on the planet and, on the other hand, people who believe dinosaurs roamed the Earth 6,000 years ago? Of if I may employ Mencken's terminology from a happier time, how does one appeal to both the inferior man and his betters?

Rove showed that it can be done. Surveying the results, however, I doubt it will ever be done again.

Paul Mulshine is a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.