Appearing on the Brody File show on the Christian Broadcasting Network, former George W. Bush speechwriter and now Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson charged that President Obama has “abused that [faith-based] office in political ways.” That’s coming from someone who worked in the Bush administration, which created and then politicized the office.
Gerson thinks that Obama should use the office to focus on what religious charities can do to help the poor. He thinks that, for example, enlisting charities to help connect poor children to health insurance, as the Obama administration has done, constitutes abusing the office.
The Obama administration has gone out of its way to claim that its faith-based effort is not focused on doling out money to faith-based groups (although about a dozen agencies are still authorized to do so, and still do) but on building partnerships to, among other things, combat poverty. The Gersons of the world think that faith-based groups are better at helping the poor than the government is. But not, apparently, if these charities are helping parents get their children on — horrors! — government-funded health insurance.
Obama’s faith-based office has issues, but this doesn’t appear to be one high on the list of offenses. How is this initiative more politically calculating or cynical or wrong than Karl Rove trying to get more African-Americans to vote Republican by doling out cash to Eddie Long?
Gerson has recently co-authored a book on religion and politics with former Bush staffer Peter Wehner, now a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. On CBN, the pair was finger-wagging at Obama for screwing up how he talks to evangelicals.
“Has he blown it with Christians?” asked host Jennifer Wishner.
“In some ways he has,” Gerson replied, adding that Obama had an unprecedented outreach to evangelicals during the campaign but now 45% of evangelicals don’t know what his religion is.
Wishner asked Wehner if Obama could win back evangelicals. Referring to the administration, he said, “they’ve been hyperpartisan, and they’ve targeted people that they disagreed with as if they’re enemies of the state in a way that at times seems Nixonian.” Nixonian! (Not Bushian. Or Cheneyian.) And “hyperpartisan.” (No, he wasn’t talking about the Republicans.)
I know Wehner — we’ve been on C-SPAN together talking about (what else) religion and politics — so I asked him what he meant. He emailed me a piece he’d written about the administration’s attack on the Chamber of Commerce foreign funding, in which he describes an “abuse of power” of “McCarthyite” proportions. (Progressive blogger Glenn Greenwald makes a similar argument, but he calls questions around the Chamber’s foreign funding a “legitimate issue” that has been “obscured by reckless, sloppy and somewhat McCarthyite behavior” by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.) Lee Fang, the Center for American Progress blogger who broke the story, has more details on the funding this week and told me that the Chamber’s use of foreign funding for political attack ads “is unprecedented.”
Anything else? I asked Wehner, aside from going after that well-known friend of Jesus, the Chamber of Commerce? His replies included Obama’s “off-putting tone;” “comity” giving way to “combat;” and undermining the Hyde Amendment (via the alleged funding of abortion in the health reform law).
Obama had a lot of support from religious activists who really wanted to see health care reform passed. To them, passing the bill was about helping the poor and the middle class, and they even enlisted Obama to perform on a conference call to prove how much his faith informed his action.
See how this will never be good enough for the conservatives? If they don’t like the health care law at all, then Obama talking about how there’s a moral imperative to have health care reform won’t make them think he’s faithy. Nor will talking about Jesus. That’s because the anti-Obama-ism more prevalent among evangelicals than other religious groups isn’t about religion. It’s about politics.
