Headlines, Human Rights, North America, Religion | Analysis

POLITICS-US: In Search of a Legacy, Bush Looks to the Past

Analysis by Bill Berkowitz*

OAKLAND, California, Jul 3 2008 (IPS) - Before 9/11, before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, before the suspension of habeas corpus, before the administration’s tardy and shameful response to Hurricane Katrina, before cronies and Republican congressional leaders were dropping like flies, before former administration operatives were writing unflattering tell-all books, before Dick Cheney said “So?” in response to a question about public opinion being firmly against the administration, before the Valerie Plame affair, before gas prices were nearly five dollars a gallon, before housing foreclosures hit record numbers, and before his approval rating dipped to all-time lows, there was President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative.

A shining example of “compassionate conservatism”, it was intended to be the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s domestic policy agenda.

On Jan. 29, 2001, a little over a week after the start of his first term, Bush, surrounded by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clergy, issued an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI). He followed that up with another executive order that eventually established Faith-Based and Community offices at 11 federal agencies.

Now, in what seems like a search for a glimmer of a positive legacy, Bush is once again talking about his faith-based initiative. On Jun. 26, during a conference of faith-based groups in Washington, Bush dusted off the phrase “compassionate conservatism”. “You’ve helped revolutionise the way government addresses the greatest challenges facing our society,” Bush told the crowd. “I truly believe the faith-based initiative is one of the most important initiatives of this administration.”

Bush pointed out that from the outset of his administration, he used an “approach called ‘compassionate conservatism,’ …[which] was compassionate because it was rooted in a timeless truth: that we ought to love our neighbours as we’d like to be loved ourselves. And it was conservative, because it recognised the limits of government: Bureaucracies can put money in people’s hands, but they cannot put hope in a person’s heart.”

On his Jun. 28, Saturday morning radio broadcast, Bush re-visited the subject, touting a number of its successes: “Through their partnerships with the government, [faith-based] …organisations have helped reduce the number of chronically homeless by nearly 12 percent – getting more than 20,000 Americans off the streets. They have helped match nearly 90,000 children of prisoners with adult mentors. And they have helped provide services such as job placement for thousands of former inmates.”

“Faith-based and community groups have also had a powerful impact overseas. In Africa, they have participated in our Malaria Initiative. In just over two years, this effort has reached more than 25 million people – and according to new data, malaria rates are dropping dramatically in many parts of that continent.” Stripped of alliteration, “compassionate conservatism” – introduced to the public by then Texas Governor Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign – is the political packaging of the right’s long-term goals of limited government, privatisation, deregulation and the creation of a new social contract. The Sacramento News & Review’s R.V. Scheide recently noted that “compassionate conservatism” was “promptly abandoned in favour of tax cuts for the rich, programme cuts for everybody else and out-of-control budget deficits driven by the military debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Last year, faith-based organisations received 2.2 billion dollars – about 10 percent of the competitive grants awarded to nonprofit groups by 11 federal agencies.

In “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.” David Kuo, the former second-in-command of the White House Office, provided an insiders account of how the Bush White House politicised 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.

While Bush’s faith-based initiative has spread its tentacles to a host of federal, state and local government agencies – 35 governors and more than 70 mayors, both Democratic and Republican, have established programmes modeled after the federal “faith-based and community initiatives” programme – it has failed to receive the full legislative stamp of approval from Congress.

Early on, critics from the Religious Right warned that the initiative could be used to put money into the hands of such groups as the Church of Scientology or the Nation of Islam. Critics on the left argued that the initiative deliberately fudged the boundaries between church and state.

And during its seven-year lifespan, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives has been run by three directors. Bush’s first appointee, the academic John DiIulio, resigned under pressure from conservatives. He was followed by Jim Towey who, in 2006, left to become president of Saint Vincent College, a small Catholic school in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

The office is now headed by Jay Hein, the former president of the Indianapolis-based Sagamore Institute for Policy Research, who also served as executive vice president and CEO of the Foundation for American Renewal, “which provides financial grants and other support to community-based organisations and educates the general public on effective compassion practices”.

Most importantly, there has been no paper trail – documented evidence based on scientific rather than anecdotal data – that faith-based organisations provide services better than or equal to secular groups.

Bush’s speech at the Washington conference came on the heels of revelations that the faith-based initiative was giving contracts to administration cronies. According to ABC News, “A former top official in the White House’s faith-based office was awarded a lucrative Department of Justice grant under pressure from two senior Bush administration appointees, according to current and former DOJ [Justice Department] staff members and a review of internal DOJ documents and emails.”

ABC pointed out that a 1.2-million-dollar grant “was jointly awarded to a consulting firm run by Lisa Trevino Cummins who previously headed Hispanic outreach efforts for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and a California evangelical group, Victory Outreach.”

“The grant was awarded,” ABC found, “over the strong objections of career DOJ staff who did not believe that Victory Outreach was qualified for the grant and that too great an amount of the funds was going to Cummins’ consulting company instead of being spent on services for children.”

According to ABC, Cummins’ company, Urban Strategies LLC, “was slated to get one third of the money for helping the self-described ‘evangelising’ Victory Outreach use the rest of the funds.”

Speaking at the Jun. 26 conference, Bush told the audience that the faith-based initiative was “one of the most important initiatives of this administration,” and he expressed confidence that it would continue after he leaves office next January.

Less than a week after Bush’s appearance, Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, announced a plan to both expand and remake the faith-based initiative. His plan called for a “Council for Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships” which would “help set our national agenda” and deal with such problems as AIDS in the inner cities and climate change.

Obama’s plan, as might be expected, received praise from some quarters and criticism from others. John DiIulio, the first director of Bush’s faith-based programme, said that Obama’s proposal appeared to include “much that was best” of what Bush set out to do. “Especially in urban America, all the empirical evidence continues to show that local faith-based organisations can make a measurable civic difference,” DiIulio said in a statement released by Obama’s campaign.

However, the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for separation of church and state, expressed “disappointment” in Obama’s move. “This initiative has been a failure on all counts, and it ought to be shut down, not expanded,” he said.

Still, even Lynn was gratified to hear that Obama’s plan would not blur church-state boundaries: “Obama has promised that he will not support publicly funded proselytism or discrimination in hiring, and that’s an important commitment.”

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.