Posted: 10/13/06
Book alleges faith-based initiatives are bogus
By Robert Marus
ABP Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON (ABP)—A new book by a former White House faith official is causing shockwaves—even before its release—with reportedly explosive allegations that President Bush’s aides have been duping religious conservatives for political gain.
MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” program first reported the allegations Oct. 11. They are found, according to the show, in Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, a new tell-all memoir by former White House official David Kuo, scheduled for release Oct. 16.
From 2001 to 2003, Kuo served as the No. 2 official in Bush’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. MSNBC reported the book includes charges that high-ranking White House officials referred to prominent conservative Christian leaders as “nuts” behind their backs, used the faith-based office to organize ostensibly non-political events that in reality were designed to boost Republican candidates in tough elections, and favored religious charities friendly to the administration when doling out grant money.
“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 wrote. Top political officials in the office of White House aide Karl Rove referred to the leaders as “the nuts,” he added.
A publicist with Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, said Oct. 12 that the book was “embargoed” until its official release date—meaning the firm would not release advance copies to journalists and reviewers, as is often done in the publishing world. However, Olbermann said his show obtained a copy of the book ahead of time.
Among the other Kuo allegations MSNBC quoted are charges that White House senior political operatives gave marching orders to officials in the faith-based office during the 2002 election season.
Kuo asserted Ken Mehlman, then Bush’s director of political affairs, told the faith-based office to hold many of their ostensibly non-partisan conferences in districts where Republican members of Congress faced tough re-election challenges.
Republicans ended up winning 19 out of the 20 races, Kuo said, and the conferences even affected the 2004 presidential campaign—contributing to Bush’s margin of victory over Democratic challenger John Kerry in crucial battleground states like Ohio.
MSNBC also reported that Kuo charged the White House’s own rationale for pushing the faith-based initiative—an effort to make it easier for churches and other sectarian organizations to receive federal social-service funding—was bogus.
Bush and his lieutenants regularly argued that religious groups had been unfairly shut out of many government grant programs because of their faith-based nature. However, Kuo said, that may not have been the case.
“Finding [examples of such discrimination against religious groups] became a huge priority,” he wrote. “If President Bush was making the world a better place for faith-based groups, we had to show it was really a bad place to begin with. But, in fact, it wasn’t that bad at all.”
Kuo also reportedly alleges that Bush officials administering grant programs under the initiative favored faith groups politically friendly to the administration—even going so far as to discriminate against non-Christian groups.
Kuo, who has strong conservative evangelical credentials including past work for Bill Bennett and John Ashcroft, has criticized the administration in recent years for its handling of the faith-based issue. However, his previous criticisms—in congressional testimony and op-ed columns for the religious news website Beliefnet—have been neither as dramatic nor as specific as those contained in the book.
They echo concerns expressed by his former boss. John DiIulio, the first director of the faith-based office, quit abruptly seven months after he started. In his only public interview about the issue, he made headlines by criticizing the administration for playing politics with the initiative to drum up support among conservative Christians but then putting little real muscle behind getting it completed.
DiIulio, reportedly under pressure from the White House, later backed away from those comments. Now a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, he has not spoken to the news media about the issue since. By mid-afternoon Eastern time Oct. 13, he had not returned an Associated Baptist Press reporter’s phone calls requesting reaction to Kuo’s book.
DiIulio’s successor in the White House faith-based office, Jim Towey, said Kuo’s reported allegations were seriously off base. Towey, who is now president of St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa., said Oct. 13 he has not seen a copy of the book, but has heard about the excerpted sections.
“The White House that he describes is not the White House that I worked four years in,” Towey said, in a telephone interview. “There was enormous respect for religion—for religious leaders of all denominations and faiths. And, whether he found some low-level employees cracking jokes or whatever, I have to leave that to him and God. But, at the level I worked, that simply did not happen. President Bush would not have tolerated it.”
Reported allegations regarding politicization of the faith-based office’s conferences were baseless, he said.
“I visited more Democrat districts than I did Republican ones; I had more events with Democrat officials than Republican ones. I went where I was invited and where the need was greatest,” he said.
Towey pointed to meetings his office held at the invitation Democratic incumbents—like Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu and Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford, Jr.—locked in tight races with Republicans.
“I just think that he [Kuo] is entitled to his opinion, but he did not make the decisions; I did,” Towey said. “I made the decisions focusing on the poor and not politics.”
Towey’s successor in the White House, Jay Hein, did not return a phone call requesting comment on Kuo’s allegations.
But White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, asked about them during his regular Oct. 13 daily press briefing, said the Kuo who wrote the book sounded very different than the Kuo who left the White House in 2003.
Snow quoted “a very warm letter” that Kuo wrote Bush upon leaving the White House expressing pride in the accomplishments of the faith-based initiatives office.
Snow also said Rove had denied referring to conservative Christian leaders with derisive terminology. “These are people who are friends. You don’t talk about friends that way,” he said.
White House officials had not yet seen a copy of the book, Snow added. “I think we are going to need the benefit of being able to take a look specifically at what he says and how he frames it up, and all that, before we can give you detailed answers.”
A spokesperson at Focus on the Family said James Dobson and many of the organization’s media-relations officials were unavailable for comment Oct. 12 and 13. She pointed to a statement the group released Oct. 13 attacking Kuo’s book—and the media—for the allegations and their timing.
“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,” said the statement from Carrie Gordon Earll, the group’s director of issue analysis.
Earll said the book excerpts “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.”
She also attacked the “big media,” who “ 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.”
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