Former Special Assistant to the president and Deputy Director of Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative David Kuo today blasted Congress and his former boss for not living up to the President’s compassionate conservative promises to make a real difference in the lives of poor and desperate Americans by funding faith-based charities. Kuo has some strong, bitter words for all concerned:
[Democrats:] The moment the president announced the faith-based effort, Democratic opposition was frenzied. Hackneyed church-state scare rhetoric made the rounds; this was "radical" and "dangerous" and merely an "attempt to fund Bob Jones University." One Democratic African-American congressman came to the White House to back the president but was threatened by influential liberal groups that they would withhold funding if he didn’t denounce the President. The next day he was forced to retract his statement. All of this came despite the fact that former Vice President Al Gore had endorsed virtually identical faith-based measures during the 2000 campaign. […]
[Republicans:] Congressional Republicans matched Democratic hostility with snoring indifference. Sen. Rick Santorum spent endless hours alone lobbying Senate Leadership to give some floor time, any floor time to get a bill to help charities and the poor – even after 9/11 when charities were going out of business because of a decline in giving. He was stiff-armed by his own party.
At the end of the day, both parties played to stereotype — Republicans were indifferent to the poor and the Democrats were allergic to faith.
[And the White House:] Capitol Hill gridlock could have been smashed by minimal West Wing effort. No administration since LBJ’s has had a more successful legislative track record than this one. From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants. It never really wanted the "poor people stuff."
Although he’s clearly more disappointed than angry at the President and feels the Democrats are really the ones who’ve dropped the ball over the past 30 years with regards to helping the poor via funding religious charities, Kuo corrects himself a bit in his criticism of Democrats with the following admission and assessment:
In December 2001, for instance, Sen. Daschle approached the Domestic Policy Council with an offer to pass a charity relief bill that contained many of the president’s campaign tax incentive policies plus new money for the widely-popular and faith-based-friendly Social Services Block Grant. The White House legislative affairs office rolled their eyes while others on senior staff yawned. We had to leave the offer on the table.
They could afford to. Who was going to hold them accountable? Drug addicts, alcoholics, poor moms, struggling urban social service organizations, and pastors aren’t quite the NRA.
But Kuo does more than bellyache about lost dreams, he offers rather damning numbers:
[A] conservative Texas governor promised more than $8 billion during his first year in office to help social service organizations better serve "the least, the last, and the lost." More than $6 billion was to go for new tax incentives that would generate billions more in private charitable giving. Another $1.7 billion a year would fund faith-based (and non-faith-based) groups caring for drug addicts, at-risk youth, and teen moms. $200 million more would establish a "Compassion Capital Fund" to assist, expand and replicate successful local programs. […]
Sadly, four years later these promises remain unfulfilled in spirit and in fact. In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. The Compassion Capital Fund has received a cumulative total of $100 million during the past four years. And new programs including those for children of prisoners, at-risk youth, and prisoners reentering society have received a little more than $500 million over four years–or approximately $6.3 billion less than the promised $6.8 billion.
What intrigues me most about this confession is how he tempers his disappointment with what seem obligatory digs at Liberals. With the Conservatives in control of the House, Senate, and White House, he still dedicates equal space to the effect that Liberals who don’t like the blurring of Church and State had on squashing this program. As if the President paid any attention to focus groups.
The White House’s response to Kuo’s accusations was as follows:
"The president has made the faith-based initiative one of his highest priorities," [White House press secretary Scott McClellan ] said. "It was at the top of his list when he came into office and it remains on the top of the list as we move into the second term."
Just imagine how little progress would be made in helping the poor if this were at the second or third spot on the President’s list.
My heart goes out to Kuo. Even though I disagree that there’s as little danger in blurring the line between Church and State as he thinks there is, he strikes me as someone who ultimately really wants to make a difference. What this has done to him personally is a shame:
I left the White House in December 2003. By that time, I’d grown quite frustrated with White House and Congressional approaches to faith-based issues and I let those in power know it. Virtually everything I’ve written here I told to those above me more than a year ago. I hoped things would change. But frankly I didn’t quite trust my own judgment. I’d survived an intense health crisis but quickly returned to work; I wondered if my grumpiness came from fatigue, stress, or something my doctors secretly did to me while I was sick. I left, and went fishing. Literally. I joined the professional bass fishing tour and spent a chunk of my time on my (loaned) Skeeter boat stalking fish, clearing my head, and pursuing God. I figured that with time, my anger would subside.
I was right. The anger did. The sadness hasn’t.
Edward,
Good post, and it brings to mind something I’ve noted frequently in discussions with Republicans, here and elsewhere. They rarely criticize their own, and if they must, they feel they need to bash Democrats first to show their bona fides. Sebastian’s Exhortation post and the discussion of the word “Clintonian” in it is a recent example.
I don’t see Democrats doing the same (e.g., when hilzoy or Katherine mention their objections to Clinton’s policies, they don’t feel the need to add gratuitous Republican bashing).
I find this a continually frustrating aspect of my discussions, but I don’t know how we can get past it. Suggestions?
I don’t think the federal gov’t ought to be funding faith-based groups, whether by dint of Gore or Bush.
And before someone comments by pointing me at the succeeding post by Charles Bird on Thomas Woods, note that most of the post deals with proving that he is not a conservative as Bird defines it.
I find this a continually frustrating aspect of my discussions, but I don’t know how we can get past it. Suggestions?
By calling them on it, and helping them move past it. If they seem to do it on autopilot, try this approach:
“Yeah, yeah, everything is Clinton’s fault, I got it, but you had a specific criticism of the White House’s failure to live up to this promise here that I was interested in, can you elaborate on that?”
Mind you, there are Democrats guilty of this as well, and the same approach works for them. Let folks know their specific ideas are interesting to you and give them credit for criticizing their own.
I’ve never understood how “faith-based initiatives” could not have been shot down immediately as unConstitutional. Maybe someone could explain the reason why it wasn’t?
David Kuo’s story is hardly surprising: Bush’s SOP is to make big talk but fail to follow up on words with actions.
Ask how much money has been paid out of the Millennium Challenge Account to the countries that were supposed to benefit from it? As of January 28th this year, not one of them had received one penny.
re: unconstitutionality of faith-based initiatives.
to start, it turns on the First Amendment, which prohibits both establishment of religion (the Establishment Clause) and the free exercise of religion (the Free Exercise Clause).
Giving grants to faith-based organizations is one of those tricky issues that seem to fall afoul of both clauses.
The US Govt gives out billions of dollars in grants every year for all sorts of things. Refusing to give a grant to an organization simply because its membership is organized around a particular faith (as opposed to, say, location) would pretty clearly violate the free exercise clause.
HOWEVER, if the organization will be hiring persons with the grant funds in order to achieve the purpose of the grant, we then have to ask whether the organization can require that the person hired be a member of that religion. If the faith-based organization can discriminate in hiring, or in the distribution of grant funds, based on religion, then it starts to look like a violation of the Establishment Clause. The Govt trying to do in two steps what it cannot do in one — establish religion.
this is the outline of the issue.
Francis
Am I the only one disturbed by the fact that Bush just did this with an executive order rather than trying to pass it in Congress?
Am I the only one disturbed by the fact that Bush just did this with an executive order rather than trying to pass it in Congress?
That’s on my list of things to be disturbed about Bush for, praktike, but it’s back on the 19th or 20th page, I believe.
That’s on my list of things to be disturbed about Bush for, praktike, but it’s back on the 19th or 20th page, I believe.
You’re very systematic! I’m impressed…
Here’s Fukuyama:
“[T]o maintain a liberal political order, there must be a fundamental separation between religion and state formation.”
Good post, and it brings to mind something I’ve noted frequently in discussions with Republicans, here and elsewhere. They rarely criticize their own, and if they must, they feel they need to bash Democrats first to show their bona fides.
I think it is fundamental to the definition of the two sides. If one views the left as being based on demanding changes in the state while the right is advocating the status quo, it makes perfect sense that the left would splinter into different groups advocating different approaches. More than one way to skin a cat and all that.
What is interesting is that in the US, where change has always been viewed as the status quo, we have various twists and turns, and as the world adopts a notion of change=good, we see it occur there as well (Think Labour=support of Bush or Mitterand as a socialist and Chirac as a conservative) This notion of change as good led to the fragmentation of the republican party until they were famously glued together by Reagan. However, the left remains fractious, true to their fundamental nature.