TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2010 MICHAEL GERSON


Believers’ remorse A


s a candidate, it was a measure of Barack Obama’s political in- novation and ambition that he


set out to win religious voters, in- cluding evangelical Christians. As president, his failure in this effort is equally revealing.


During the campaign, Obama’s


brand of progressivism was refresh- ingly free of secularism. He com- bined a conciliatory message — that believers do not need to “leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square” — with persis- tent outreach to religious leaders. He affirmed the importance of faith- based organizations in the provision of social services, pledging they would “be central to our White House mis- sion.” And he made his convictions clear: “I am a Chris- tian, and I am a de- vout Christian,” he told Christianity Today in 2008. “I be- lieve in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The ground was fertile for political


Obama has lost ground with religious Americans and provoked a culture war over the size and role of government.


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A15 EUGENE ROBINSON


gious appeal is also ideological. It is true that evangelicals are generally not libertarian. They admit a place for government in encouraging val- ues and caring for the needy. Yet they do not believe that governmental elites share their values or have their best interests at heart. Among con- servative Christians, government is often viewed as a force of seculariza- tion — a source of both bureaucratic regulation and moral deregulation. By identifying with expanded gov- ernment, Obama fed long-standing evangelical fears of the aggressive, secular state. This is where an embrace of the faith-based agen- da might have helped Obama. The promotion of social justice through the fund- ing of faith-based charities and community


or-


sowing. Many evangelicals were wea- ry of being associated with the harsh tone of the religious right; they were increasingly concerned with ideolog- ically unpredictable issues such as global AIDS; and their ties to the Re- publican Party were somewhat strained. On Election Day, Obama’s gains among religious voters were modest but measurable. He improved on John Kerry’s 2004 performance among Protestant, Catholic and Jew- ish voters. John McCain’s support among white evangelicals remained high — 73 percent — but still six points below George W. Bush’s re- sults in the previous election. It was a beginning — that quickly ended. Growing percentages of Americans have described the Demo- cratic Party as “unfriendly” toward religion. Obama has lost ground with religious Americans across the board, with Mormons and Protes- tants the most disillusioned. A recent Pew Research poll found that 42 per- cent of white evangelicals say they don’t know what religion Obama practices. Evangelicals were a heavy presence at the Glenn Beck rally on the National Mall, and a new study by the Public Religion Research Insti- tute has found a large conservative Christian presence in the Tea Party ranks. There are a number of reasons for the believers’ remorse. Social issues blurred during a campaign naturally become more vivid and divisive in the process of governing. Obama’s campaign appeal to reconciliation — which impressed many religious vot- ers — has dissolved into prickly parti- sanship.


But the failure of Obama’s reli- RICHARD COHEN


service on my iPhone. I have created a station that plays folk rock. Lately, it has repeatedly played the Neil Young song “Ohio”: “What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?” On the bike, I have to repress a tear. “Ohio” has been around for 40 years, and I have heard it over and over again. It’s about the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State Univer- sity during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The killers were the equally young men of the Ohio Na- tional Guard. I was in the National Guard myself once. How did this hap- pen? “This summer I hear the drum- ming. Four dead in Ohio.” The hills slow me. I grind at them,


going so slowly that when the song comes on I can listen intently to the lyrics. The line about the woman dead on the ground hits with concus- sive force. I feel I knew her. One of the four killed was Allison Krause, and she went to school in the Washington area. Her father, Arthur Krause, sometimes called me. Arthur had de- voted himself to seeking justice for his daughter. He should have known better. He was a Holocaust survivor. Saturday, on the bike, I listened


hard: “Tin soldiers and Nixon com- ing. We’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio.” I had been a reporter back when the killings occurred and it was a huge story to me. I longed for a chance to cover it, but I was young and raw, and the journalistic sluggers whooshed out of the newsroom, hailed a cab, jumped a plane and wrote the story — the story. The story will keep you sane. But it is a story no more and so, on


the bike, the full horror of it came through: My God, American soldiers had shot American college students. This was not China, not Tiananmen Square, and not Iran and the pro- democracy rallies of last year — not any of those places. This was Amer- ica, just yesterday (take my word for it) and yet it had happened. How? I thought hard and then I remem- bered. Bullets had killed those kids,


When words can kill I


still ride a bike. I do 12 miles, sev- eral days a week, and as I do so I listen to music — the Pandora


ganizations is less threatening to reli- gious conservatives than the con- struction of bureaucracies. But Obama has mainly employed his faith-based office to defend feder- al initiatives, particularly health-care reform. “Get out there and spread the word,” he recently told faith leaders. “I think all of you can be really im- portant validators and trusted re- sources for friends and neighbors, to help explain what’s now available to them.” Such obvious political ma- nipulation only feeds skepticism. Instead of creatively reaching out to religious conservatives, Obama has driven them toward an ideologi- cal decision. America is accustomed to culture war arguments on abor- tion and family issues. The president has provoked a culture war debate on the size and role of government. If the choice is between bureaucratic centralization and Tea Party revolt, most evangelicals will choose the lat- ter.


That choice is false and unfortu-


nate. There are a range of options be- tween government as the first resort and government as the enemy — op- tions that few in our political debate seem willing to offer. Religious con- servatives are not natural allies of Dick Armey’s predominantly secular libertarians and could easily be ex- ploited in this association. As I argue with my co-author Pete Wehner in a new book, “City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era,” Christians have often been compromised by identifying too closely with narrow ideological agendas. But many religious conservatives and libertarians are now bound in their resistance to Obama’s ideologi- cal overreach. Instead of breaking off a piece of the religious vote for his party, Obama has sent a portion into the Tea Party’s embrace. michaelgerson@washpost.com


Who’s buying?


Anonymous cash cows put democracy in peril


herd of sheep. How sweet and innocent they seem, these mysterious organiza- tions with names like Americans for Job Security. Who could argue with that? Who wants job insecurity? It turns out, according to The Post,


T LAURENT CIPRIANI/ASSOCIATED PRESS


A French soldier patrols around the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday. ANNE APPLEBAUM


A terrorism alert to ignore Why warnings without specifics are useless


“The State Department alerts U.S. citi- zens to the potential for terrorist attacks in Europe. . . . Terrorists may elect to use a variety of means and weapons and target both official and private interests. U.S. citizens are reminded of the poten- tial for terrorists to attack public trans- portation systems and other tourist in- frastructure. Terrorists have targeted and attacked subway and rail systems, as well as aviation and maritime ser- vices. U.S. citizens should take every pre- caution to be aware of their surround- ings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.” — State Department travel alert, Oct. 3


S


peaking as an American who lives in Europe, I feel it is incumbent upon me to describe what people


sure — but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians. The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protest- ers. They were “worse than the Brownshirts and the communist ele- ment. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent.” That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage that fuels too much of the Tea Party and is the sum total of gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino’s campaign message in New York. It is all this talk about “taking back Amer- ica” (from whom?) and this inchoate fury at immigrants and, of course, this raw anger at Muslims, stoked by politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio, the latter having lost the GOP primary to Paladino for, among other things, not being suffi- ciently angry. “I’m going to take them out,” Paladino vowed at a Tea Party rally in Ithaca, N.Y. Back in the Vietnam War era, the


left also used ugly language and re- sorted to violence. But the right, as is its wont, stripped the antiwar move- ment of its citizenship. It turned dis- sent into treason, which, in a way, was the worst treason of all. It made dissidents into the storied “other” who had nothing in common with the rest of us. They were not opponents; they were the enemy: Fire! On my bike, I recalled those days and wondered if they have not re- turned. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words — that singsong re- buttal notwithstanding — can kill. We lose presidents to words and civil rights leaders to words — homosex- uals and immigrants and abortion providers, too. Richard Nixon is named in the song because he was the president at the time and because his words were ugly. He was en- thralled by toughness, violence. I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A les- son.


cohenr@washpost.com


like me do when we hear warnings like this one issued on Sunday: We do noth- ing. We do nothing, first and foremost, be- cause there is nothing that we can do. Unless the State Department gets specif- ic — e.g., “don’t go to the Eiffel Tower to- morrow” — information at that level of generality is meaningless. Unless we are talking about weapons of mass destruc- tion, the chances of being hit by a car while crossing the street are still greater than the chances of being on that one plane or one subway car that comes un- der attack. Besides, nobody living or working in a large European city (or even a small one) can indefinitely avoid coming within close proximity of “offi- cial and private” structures affiliated with U.S. interests — a Hilton hotel, an Apple computer shop — not to mention subways, trains, airplanes, boats and all other forms of public transportation. Second, we do nothing because if the language is that vague, then nobody is really sure why the warning has been is- sued in the first place. Obviously, if the American government knew who the terrorists were and what they were go- ing to attack, it would arrest them and stop them. If it can’t do any better than mentioning “tourist infrastructure” and public transportation, it doesn’t really know anything at all. In which case, why are they telling us about it? Since the warning made break- fast television on Sunday morning, speculation has been rife. So far I have heard at least one full-blown conspiracy theory: Some believe the U.S. govern-


ment has issued this statement to fright- en Europeans into greater intelligence cooperation, and in particular to per- suade the European Union to agree to a new system of airline passenger data ex- change.


Other rumors say that the CIA be-


lieves al-Qaeda, or some al-Qaeda knockoff group, is planning simulta- neous attacks on hotels in major Euro- pean cities, something like the 2008 at- tacks on the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai. This information, according to the ru- mor, is supposed to have come from an interrogation carried out last summer. Yet even if U.S. intelligence agencies possess information as solid as that — and, I repeat, I have absolutely no evi- dence that they do — there is still no point in the State Department telling us to remain alert when standing next to any American object, because even if we do it today, we won’t tomorrow. This sort of thing has happened be-


fore. In 2004, the employees of the IMF and World Bank in Washington arrived at work to find themselves the subject of sudden media interest: Maps and de- tailed plans of their offices had been found on a laptop in Afghanistan, and a warning had been issued as a result. But, of course, it wasn’t realistic to maintain a vigilant watch of indefinite length on a building used by hundreds of people ev- ery day, many of them suspiciously for- eign-looking. And, of course, the advice was quickly forgotten, and everyone went back to work. In truth, the only people who can


profit from such a warning are the offi- cials who issue it. If something does happen, they are covered: They warned us, they told us in advance, they won’t be criticized or forced to resign. And if nothing happens, then we’ll all forget about it anyway. Except that we don’t forget about it. Over time, these kinds of enigmatic warnings do al-Qaeda’s work for it, scar- ing people without cause. Without so much as lifting a finger, Osama bin Lad- en disrupts our sense of security and well-being. At the same time, such warn- ings put the U.S. government in the posi- tion of the boy who cried wolf. The more often general warnings are issued, the less likely we are to heed them. We are perhaps unsettled or unnerved, but we don’t know what to do. So we do nothing — and wish that we’d been told nothing as well.


applebaumletters@washpost.com POST PARTISAN


Excerpts from The Post’s opinion blog, updated daily at washingtonpost.com/postpartisan


DAVID IGNATIUS


U.S. aid to Pakistan shouldn’t go unsung


islamabad


Hundreds of Americans have been working their butts off to help Pakistan cope with their flood disaster, and they haven’t been getting much credit for it — including from me. I wrote last week from a village called Pir


Sabak in northwestern Pakistan that U.S. flood relief wasn’t evident there, or elsewhere along the way. “The U.S. military has been working hard to provide flood assistance, but most of that is invisible to Pakistanis,” I not- ed. That seemed to me to be a missed oppor- tunity — and characteristic of a weird misfire in U.S. public diplomacy. For a superpower, we can be oddly shy about advertising our good works. I have since talked more about this prob- lem with U.S. officials managing the relief ef- fort, who felt their colleagues’ work had been slighted. They’re right; America has been making a big effort to help the flood victims, more than any other nation. But I’m more convinced than ever that the way we’re doing it — providing food aid through the United Nations, for example, and focusing on trans- porting it rather than taking credit for its dis- tribution — reduces its public impact. Here are some statistics that I didn’t men- tion in my earlier column and should have: The U.S. government has provided a total of


$362 million in aid; there are 26 U.S. military helicopters in Pakistan supporting relief ef- forts; four to six C-130 and C-17 cargo planes are transporting people and assistance every day; the United States has moved more than 20,000 refugees and 13 million pounds of re- lief supplies.


William S. Berger, who heads the disaster assistance response team for the U.S. Agency for International Development, says the Paki- stan flood is the worst natural disaster he’s seen in 20 years of dealing with such crises. “We did an amazing job here. Why is it not more widely known?” he wonders. That’s a fair question. Brig. Gen. Michael Nagata, an Army Spe-


cial Forces officer who is the deputy military attaché at the U.S. Embassy, has switched the past two months from focusing on security is- sues to supervising flood relief. “Our first pri- ority is helping these people,” he says, rather than bragging in the Pakistani media about it.


Maybe that makes our assistance true hu- manitarian aid, offered to help people rather than to gain political benefit. But unself- ishness has its limits. American do-gooders can make anonymous private contributions if they want. Our public assistance should get some return. In a country as anti-American as Pakistan, it doesn’t make sense to be quite so low-key.


American soldiers and civilians here have been making a difference in helping the des- perate flood victims, and their work shouldn’t go unsung, by Pakistanis or by visit- ing columnists.


that an entity called Americans for Job Security has made nearly $7.5 million in “independent” campaign expenditures this year, with 88 per- cent going to support Republican candidates. Who’s putting up all that money? You’ll never know, because Americans for Job Security — which calls itself a “business association” — doesn’t have to disclose the source of its funding. Likewise, the American Future


Fund has spent $6.8 million on cam- paigns this year, with every penny of that money benefiting Republicans. The patriotically named group — and, really, who doesn’t want Amer- ica to have a future? — is based in Iowa and has never before been a big player in the Great Game of cam- paign finance. Now, suddenly, it has a king’s ransom to throw around. Whose money is it? The American


Future Fund won’t tell you. And then there’s American Cross- roads, which at least is being “ad- vised” by some people you’ve heard of — Republican strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie. This group has spent $5.6 million so far but is just getting started: American Cross- roads says it will spend an astound- ing $50 million in this election cycle. You will not be surprised to hear


that all of this money is being used to try to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans. And where is the money coming from? Silly of you to ask. There is no limit to the amount that an individual, corpora- tion or trade association can give to American Crossroads — but the group is not required to tell you who those deep-pockets donors might be. Democrats are doing the same sort of thing, or trying to. But Repub- licans are outspending Democrats by 7 to 1 in this kind of “independent” campaign spending. So while Demo- cratic candidates enjoy a big advan- tage in official campaign funding — the kind that has limits and dis- closure requirements — this edge is blunted by the wave of “independ- ent” GOP cash. According to The Post, $80 million has been spent on midterm election campaigns by these shadowy “inde- pendent” groups — as opposed to just $16 million at this point in the 2006 midterm cycle. I put “independent” in quotes be- cause this spending is anything but. Officially, groups such as Americans for Job Security and American Cross- roads are not allowed to spend on be- half of specific candidates; rather, they are supposed to confine them- selves to such anodyne activities as highlighting issues and advocating policy positions. In practice, how- ever, this gives them the latitude to attack one candidate — a Democrat, say — for his or her position on health care, financial reform or what- ever. There can be no overt coordination


between these groups and any specif- ic candidates, but there doesn’t have to be. The political operatives in charge of the American Future Fund, for example, can read a map of con- gressional districts as well as any- body else. All they have to do is iden- tify a potentially vulnerable Demo- crat and start pouring in the cash, mostly to buy television ads accusing the incumbent of being an enemy of all that America holds dear — and, gasp, a friend of Nancy Pelosi. The Supreme Court made all this possible with its ruling early this year, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which legal- ized unlimited campaign spending by corporations, unions, trade associ- ations and other such entities. And the independent-expenditure groups with the patriotic names are often structured as nonprofits, which means they are not required to dis- close their donors publicly. The result is a system in which oil companies opposed to an energy bill that would begin to steer the country away from fossil fuels, or Wall Street firms that want to undo financial reg- ulatory reform and return to the days of the Big Casino, or gazillionaires who want to keep George W. Bush’s tax breaks, can all spend as much as they like to try to buy Congress for the Republican Party. And they can do it secretly, in the dark, without anyone knowing. It’s bad enough that public offices can be purchased. It’s unconscionable that we can’t even know who the buyers are.


The writer will answer questions at 2 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com. His e-mail address is eugenerobinson@ washpost.com.


he Republican grab for Con- gress is being funded by a pack of wolves masquerading as a


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