Former official says White House exploited Evangelicals

WASHINGTON – A new book by a former White House official says President Bush’s top political advisers privately ridiculed evangelical supporters as “nuts” and “goofy” while embracing them in public and using their votes to help win elections.

The former official also writes that the White House office of faith-based initiatives, which Bush promoted as a nonpolitical effort to support religious social service organizations, was told to host pre-election events designed to mobilize religious voters who would most likely favor Republican candidates.

The assertions by David Kuo, the former No. 2 official in the faith-based initiatives program, have rattled Republican strategists already struggling to convince evangelical voters to turn out this fall for the GOP.

Some conservatives lamented Thursday that the book, “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction,” also comes in the midst of the scandal involving former Rep. Mark Foley’s interest in male congressional pages, another threat to conservative turnout in competitive House and Senate races.

The book is scheduled to hit stores Monday, but the White House responded to its assertions Thursday as excerpts began leaking out.

In the book, Kuo, who quit the White House in 2003, accuses Karl Rove’s political staff of cynically hijacking the faith-based initiatives idea for electoral gain. It assails Bush for failing to live up to his promises of boosting the role of religious organizations in delivering social services.

White House strategists “knew ‘the nuts’ were politically invaluable, but that was the extent of their usefulness,” Kuo writes, according to the cable channel MSNBC, which obtained an advance copy.

Kuo is scheduled to appear Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes” program as part of a rollout arranged by his publisher, Simon & Schuster, which shares a corporate parent with CBS. Despite a publisher-enforced embargo, a copy of the book was purchased early at a Manhattan bookstore by a producer for MSNBC’s “Countdown,” a spokesman for the cable channel said. Program host Keith Olbermann began reading excerpts on his Wednesday show.

The White House denied Kuo’s account with help Thursday from two former officials popular among the evangelical base – former speechwriter Michael Gerson and former faith-based initiative director Jim Towey.

Gerson called Kuo’s account laughable.

“He doesn’t seem to have been working at the same White House where I worked,” Towey said. “I had marching orders from the president to keep the faith-based initiative nonpolitical, and I did.”