GOP’s ‘suckers’ striking back

“Never give a sucker an even break,” W.C. Fields, the comical con man of so many old films, was famous for saying. He’d be right at home in the Bush White House.

For we now have it on fairly good authority that the Bush team, led by Karl Rove, exploited the gullibility of Christian evangelicals to further Republican political ambitions while privately scorning them as “nuts” or “ridiculous” or “boorish” or worse. They mocked and laughed at their Christian shock troops, which is shabbily cynical but understandable.

It must be hard for experienced con artists to feel anything but contempt for the suckers, or the marks as they’re known on the street. Indeed, even onlookers feel little sympathy for marks, many of whom, maybe most, get scammed because they’re promised something they shouldn’t have in the first place.

What the evangelicals wanted from the Bushies was the power to impose a theology-driven order on government policy and the people it hires and appoints. What Rove wanted was to turn evangelical churches across the country into Republican ward clubs. It was the ultimate church-state roll in the hay.

The whistle-blower in this case is David Kuo, former deputy director of the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives in the Bush White House who has written a new book, “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.”

As Kuo tells it, the evangelical community thought it had made an alliance with a Bush White House that held evangelicals in high regard, shared their religious fervor and promised to pump federal money into faith-based institutions.

Actually, it was a cynical relationship from the start, as Kuo now sees it, in which Rove and Co. had contempt for the evangelicals. The Bush crowd “knew the nuts were politically invaluable, but that was the extent of their usefulness,” according to Kuo.

He goes on: “Sadly, the political affairs folks complained most often and most loudly about how boorish many politically involved Christians were. … National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘out of control.’ ” “Goofy” was another favorite put-down.

Kuo’s motives for blowing the whistle on the Bush team will draw questions. Not so much why he did it – his sense of having been deceived is clear – but why he did it now, at the moment of maximum electoral peril for Bush and the GOP. (Most likely a publisher’s decision.) Kuo’s conservative credentials seem genuine – he worked for former Attorney General John Ashcroft, a ranking right-winger in the Bush camp. And he’s not the first to bail out of Bush’s faith-based operation.

John J. DiIulio Jr. quit the faith-based White House office seven months after his appointment, complaining of “Mayberry Machiavellis,” a complaint presumably about political misuse of the faithful.

Evangelicals haven’t come away empty-handed from their dalliance with Bush-Rove. But they didn’t benefit as much as Bush and the GOP. They can cite Bush’s restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and several judicial appointments. But the promised federal ban on homosexual marriage – a principal goal of evangelicals – never materialized. Neither did all the money promised to religious charities, Kuo claims.

In fact, some $20 million more was provided for “compassionate social programs” in the Clinton years than ever materialized under Bush, according to Kuo.

Kuo’s book, published Monday, couldn’t have arrived at a worse time for Bush and the GOP – on the heels of the Foley-congressional page scandal, and a year in which Republicans on Capitol Hill were caught in the Abramoff lobbying scandal, former GOP House leader Tom DeLay was indicted and forced to resign, and Republican Congressmen Bob Ney and Randy “Duke” Cunningham were convicted on corruption charges. Evangelicals must be wondering how they ever fell in with such bad companions.

They shouldn’t feel too bad, however. They’re not alone. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” as the master entrepreneur P.T. Barnum discovered long ago. He’d have been a star in the Bush White House.