Democrats attempt to close the faith-gap with the GOP.
By A.B. Stoddard

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) grimaces slightly as he recalls watching Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) answer a question in the third presidential debate of 2004 about abortion and stem-cell research.

Kerry affirmed his belief in a woman's right to choose abortion but said he respected the Catholic archbishops who were urging parishioners to vote against him for those very views. He tried to explain how his faith drives his public service.

In his response, President Bush affirmed his belief in protecting the unborn. But unlike Kerry he declared, twice, his desire to "work together to reduce the number of abortions."

For Gutierrez, those moments told a familiar story of the Democratic
Party: fighting to protect individual freedom and hostage to its awkward rhetoric.

"It was almost as though after 20 years we had not arrived at an answer," he said. "We feel we should be respectful of people's independence. We have to be so careful. If you come from a position of intolerance, it's easier to explain."

Weeks later Kerry would go on to win Gutierrez's strongly Democratic Chicago district handily but not the presidency. Across the country Kerry lost to Bush among faith voters and the plurality of voters who considered moral values their top electoral concern, eclipsing — though slightly — the economy, terrorism and the war in Iraq.

LISTENING TO LIMBAUGH
To many Democrats, the verdict on values came as no surprise. But to the party's leaders, aiming to win the Congress back in 2006 and the White House back in 2008, it became a day of reckoning. In the early months of 2005 Democrats devoured polls, conducted focus groups and visited clergy.

It was time to pay people to listen to Rush Limbaugh, to learn not only what "values voters" cared about but also what they were being told.

They gathered the sobering facts: that there was a growing God-gap among voters, particularly "downscale white voters," who saw the Democrats as liberal on moral issues, inconsistent on or hostile to traditional values and "anti-religious"; that married women, who are increasingly voting Republican, place moral values at the top of their list of concerns; and that Bush had managed to win 64 percent of non-college, nonunion white voters in 2004, 41 percent of whom attend church at least once a week.

The most significant finding was that voters were making choices based more on their faith than on their physical needs, said House Democratic Caucus Chairman James Clyburn (D-S.C.).

"We thought we had made a tremendous mistake in being so caught up in maintaining not just a wall but a firewall between our politics and our religion," said Clyburn, a minister's son, handpicked by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to lead a new Faith Working Group as part of the party's larger undertaking on values issues. "The public seemed to interpret our lack of expression with a lack of commitment because we didn't speak of these things."

Eighteen months later the effort, though still largely absent among the active, grassroots left and the so-called netroots, or Internet-based activists, has inspired introspection and outreach from the party's establishment in Washington.

Major players in the party — including Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean — have held and attended conferences in the faith community and met with bishops and religious leaders including Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, and Bishop T.D. Jakes, who runs a popular megachurch in Texas.

The DNC's interfaith program, known as Faith in Action, has employed staffers to reach out to the evangelical, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish faithful. The visits and conversations have been closed to press to foster candid, open discussions.

MINDING THE GAP
Democrats know they are in a race against time, planting seeds that took decades to flower on the Republican side of the aisle. In roughly four months, the party's quiet but forceful push to overcome a values deficit will be put to its first test.

While the midterm elections will likely be decided on the war in Iraq, immigration and the economy, Democrats are hoping the groundwork they are laying will broaden the values debate and ultimately help them capture the new voters necessary to reclaim majorities nationwide and win the White House in 2008.

The strategy is not to close the gap but to hold it, said Cornell Belcher, who has done polling on values for the DNC.

"Will we start winning over these voters in large numbers? No. But we have got to stop losing them," Belcher said.

If Democrats continue to hold their advantage on such issues as prescription drugs, healthcare, Social Security and education and have chipped away at the GOP's 20-point advantage on values and national security, Belcher said, "it becomes a whole different election. The emperor has no clothes."

Jim Wallis, editor in chief of the liberal evangelical magazine Sojourners, who has counseled the Democrats since the 2004 election, has argued there exists an up-for-grabs swing group of evangelicals who reject a values debate narrowly defined by Republicans on abortion and gay marriage.

"When Jesus has somehow become pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-American, many of us feel that our faith has been stolen, and it's time to take it back," Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, wrote last year in The American Prospect.

The first door open to Democrats was the budget, and Wallis advised them to debate it as a "moral document." He also encouraged Democrats to champion poverty and the environment as moral issues and to be more willing to use moral and religious language in political speech. Reid and Pelosi led an effort to do so, and many Democrats followed. Floor debates on the budget were suddenly flush with biblical references.

Pelosi, in an interview with The Hill, said that members should not talk about their faith if it makes them feel uncomfortable but that Democrats should focus on articulating their core policy values.

"The fact that 1 in 5 children in America lives in poverty and we have policies that institutionalize that, and nothing to improve the situation, where we have a disparity of income, and access to healthcare and quality education and the rest, those are the values that people talk about as Democrats," Pelosi said.

Democrats insist that the message hasn't changed, that they trust a stepped-up public-awareness campaign in certain pockets of the population will improve their national standing.

Darrel Thompson, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers who signed on as senior adviser to Reid in early 2005, said the party must "meet the voters and constituents where they are."

Any effort to open up a dialogue has to be sincere, Thompson said, adding, "It is not wise to engage this community as the political flavor of the month."

Unlike most Democrats, Reid opposes abortion rights. His outreach to the faithful has included meetings with key religious leaders, writing op-eds for Beliefnet, appearing on "The 700 Club" and holding an annual faith-based summit in Nevada.

A RHETORICAL SHIFT
Such efforts have not gone unnoticed by Republicans. Last month, when Democrats dominated a bipartisan event joining lawmakers, clergy and lay leaders to address poverty, at which Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) received national press for a rousing speech, House Republicans simultaneously issued their American Values Agenda, a version of which had already been released in March.

The list of "freedom based" legislative priorities they plan to vote on this summer included legislation on banning Internet gambling (which passed yesterday), prohibiting human cloning and requiring that women seeking abortions be presented with medical evidence that "the unborn child feels pain, and ensure that if she chooses to continue with the abortion procedure, she has the option of choosing anesthesia for the child, so that the unborn child's pain is less severe."

In championing issues on the periphery of the abortion procedure itself — on the late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion, parental notification, etc. — Republicans have forced Democrats further into the white-hot gray area of abortion, a historic loser for them with values voters.

But now there is evidence that Democrats are beginning to embrace — at least — a rhetorical shift. This year the party decided to widen its tent, endorsing Pennsylvania state Treasurer Bob Casey Jr., who opposes abortion rights, to challenge Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).

And Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), the Democrats' presumptive front-runner in 2008, has called abortion a tragedy while endorsing pregnancy-prevention programs, including legislation to require insurance coverage of contraceptives.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), a member of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, said he is working on comprehensive legislation with abortion-rights Democrats to reduce abortions. The bill, he said, will "redefine our party and provide a roadmap for a lot of issues."

He said that it is more difficult to have a dialogue about reducing abortions than to say simply that abortion is evil but that Democrats are better at reducing abortion and that it is time to debate the question.

"We need to get creative," Ryan said, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of another. "We can't be timid on that."

Rep. Gene Taylor (Miss.) makes regular appearances on American Family Radio, one of the country's largest and most rapidly expanding Christian radio networks, to let listeners know that he opposes abortion rights and gay marriage.

Taylor, a member of the Blue Dog Coalition of conservative House Democrats, is happy to debate his view of GOP hypocrisy on the air — the fact that Republicans campaigned on a balanced budget, fewer foreign entanglements and a pledge to limit abortions. Even though Republicans control the White House, the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court, they haven't delivered on any of the three promises, he said.

"Democrats historically have made the mistake of sitting back and letting people say outrageous things about them without responding,"
Taylor said.

'THE VOTERS ARE LISTENING'
Another Southerner, Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.), agreed that Republicans have thus far "had the field to themselves."

Campaigning for the open seat of retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) as a centrist who supports the war in Iraq, is tough on immigration and opposes gay marriage, Ford said that in spite of lingering reluctance to embrace the Democrats nationally he senses a shift in Tennesseans as the failures of the Bush administration and congressional Republicans have piled up.

"The reputation still endures: that we can't manage government, we don't understand the balance of faith and government, that we can't secure and defend the homeland," Ford said. But, he added, "What this moment is about is that the voters are listening."

When the voters listen to Democrats speak in 2006 and again in 2008, some party veterans and strategists worry about what they will hear.

In their report titled "The Politics of Polarization," released in October, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck warned that "relying on language and 'framing' can be a surefire recipe for disaster in an electorate that values personal honesty and integrity even more than experience or positions on issues."

Indeed, one veteran House Democrat said he is worried the attempt may appear manufactured.

"What worries me about the Democrats is that just when the Christian conservatives realize they have been used by Republicans they are going to see the Democrats using the same phrases and making hollow gestures," the Democrat said.

Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.), one of only two members of the House and Senate to identify themselves as evangelicals in the congressional directory, said no matter how much Democrats tweak their rhetoric there are still too many voters for whom Scripture precludes agreement with the Democratic Party.

And to those voters, Souder said, criticism of Republicans for hollow gestures won't stick. The gay-marriage vote is not a political gimmick but a proxy, "a political representation of a deeper held belief, which is that the Bible is the word of God," he said.

Dan Gerstein, formerly communications director for Sen. Joe Lieberman
(D-Conn.) and now an independent consultant and commentator, said tolerance of the civil rights of homosexuals should not turn the Democrats into an intolerant party.

"It's an arrogant presumption that if you are opposed to gay marriage you are ipso facto a bigot," he said.

Gerstein said he blames the "angry and activist" core Democratic base for hindering the party's ability to connect with values voters because it has placed freedom, individual rights and tolerance before morality, fracturing the necessary balance.

"We don't have the luxury of narrowing our appeal. We have no choice but to broaden our appeal and be more inclusive," he said. "And there is a way to do so premised on respect that won't require us to change or fudge our principles."

In searching for that winning formula, A. Larry Ross, a public-relations executive representing the top Christian leaders in the country who accompanied Warren on his visit with Senate Democrats in February, offered up a public-relations adage.

"The largest number of people focused on the smallest point of agreement gives you your greatest impact," he said.
 

Redeem the Vote Homepage