http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15228489/

Exclusive: Book says Bush just using Christians
‘Tempting Faith’ author David Kuo worked for Bush from 2001 to 2003
By Jonathan Larsen
"Countdown" producer
MSNBC


Updated: 8:57 p.m. ET Oct 11, 2006
More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-
Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going
public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used
almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical
Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.

The office’s primary mission, providing financial support to charities
that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to
succeed, according to the book.

Entitled “Tempting Faith,” the book is not scheduled for release until
Oct. 16, but MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” has obtained a
copy.

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant
to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative
Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent
conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar
Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Kuo, who has complained publicly in the past about the funding
shortfalls, goes several steps further in his new book.

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were
known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as
“the nuts.”

“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 writes.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs
director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the
office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events
that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious
voters in 20 targeted races.

According to Kuo, “Ken loved the idea and gave us our marching orders.”

Among those marching orders, Kuo says, was Mehlman’s mandate to conceal
the true nature of the events.

Kuo quotes Mehlman as saying, “… (I)t can’t come from the campaigns.
That would make it look too political. It needs to come from the
congressional offices. We’ll take care of that by having our guys call
the office [of faith-based initiatives] to request the visit.”

Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans, Kuo
reports. The outreach was so extensive and so powerful in motivating not
just conservative evangelicals, but also traditionally Democratic
minorities, that Kuo attributes Bush’s 2004 Ohio victory “at least
partially … to the conferences we had launched two years before.”

With the exception of one reporter from the Washington Post, Kuo says
the media were oblivious to the political nature and impact of his
office’s events, in part because so much of the debate centered on
issues of separation of church and state.

In fact, the Bush administration often promoted the faith-based agenda
by claiming that existing government regulations were too restrictive on
religious organizations seeking to serve the public.

Substantiating that claim proved difficult, Kuo says. “Finding these
examples became a huge priority.… 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.”

In fact, when Bush asks Kuo how much money was being spent on
“compassion” social programs, Kuo claims he discovered “we were actually
spending about $20 million a year less on them than before he had taken
office.”

The money that was appropriated and disbursed, however, often served a
political agenda, Kuo claims.

“Many of the grant-winning organizations that rose to the top of the
process were politically friendly to the administration,” he says.

More pointedly, Kuo quotes an unnamed member of the review panel charged
with rating grant applications.

“But,” she said with a giggle, ‘When I saw one of those non-Christian
groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and
gave them a zero … a lot of us did.’”

“Tempting Faith” contains several other controversial claims about Kuo’s
office, the Bush White House and even the 1994 Republican revolution in
Congress.

Many of those revelations and others will be the topic of discussion on
Thursday night’s edition of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”



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