The Dems Finally Get Religion

By Amy Sullivan

Backstage at the Target Center in Minneapolis before a rally earlier this month, Barack Obama engaged in one of his pregame rituals: the presidential candidate joined a circle of young campaign supporters and staff, clasped hands with those on either side of him and prayed.

Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, has talked on the campaign trail about the "prayer warriors" who support her, and her campaign has made sure that primary voters know that Clinton used to host church picnics at the governor's mansion in Arkansas.

If the Democratic ticket in November is able to capture a greater share of religious voters than in previous elections, it will be because both Obama and Clinton have rejected their party's traditional fight- or-flight reaction to religion. For decades, the men and women who ran the Democratic Party and its campaigns bought into the conservative spin that the faithful were pro-life, right-wing and most certainly not Democratic voters. Armed with this mind-set, political professionals gave themselves permission to ignore religion and the religious. And in 2004, John Kerry paid the price for that decision.

That year, the Bush-Cheney operation did more with religious outreach than any other campaign in history, deploying a massive parish- and congregation-level mobilization effort. In Florida alone, the G.O.P. employed a state chairwoman for Evangelical outreach who appointed a dozen regional coordinators around the state and designated outreach chairs in each of Florida's 67 counties. Every county chair, in turn, recruited between 30 and 50 volunteers to contact and register their Evangelical neighbors.

The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, hired one junior staff aide with no national campaign experience to oversee religious outreach and allowed her one intern -- the two had a single telephone between them with which to recruit and contact volunteers.

It didn't take long for religion to become an issue in the campaign. In the spring of 2004, a handful of conservative Catholic bishops began to insist that Kerry, a Roman Catholic, should be denied Communion because of his support for abortion rights. A media frenzy -- quickly dubbed the "Wafer Watch" -- soon metastasized, with journalists following Kerry to Mass each Sunday and doing everything but checking his molars for evidence that he had indeed been given Communion.

The candidate's senior advisers huddled to discuss strategy. Amazingly, despite the fact that many of Kerry's congressional colleagues had faced similar problems with bishops in recent years, no one had anticipated the problem. "It never crossed our minds that this could happen," recalled Christine Stanek, deputy to Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill.

When Kerry and his advisers did reach a decision, it was underwhelming: ignore the story and hope it goes away. A few surrogates could defend Kerry in the press, but the campaign itself would maintain radio silence. It was the same strategy they would employ a few months later when the Swift Boat attacks began. The flaw in the approach, of course, was that ignoring the situation didn't mean the stories went away. It just ensured that the Kerry campaign forfeited any ability to influence the coverage. On one side of the rapidly accumulating media accounts was a handful of unusually conservative bishops whose presence suddenly loomed much larger when left unchallenged. On the other? "The Kerry campaign did not return calls for comment."

The campaign's p.r. problems weren't any better at the local level. In May, two Kerry supporters in Erie, Pa., Pat and Kristin Headley, heard that the candidate would be making a campaign stop at the local airport. Excited, they bundled their young son and daughter into the car, bringing along some poster board and markers to make signs on the way. The Headleys, who are Evangelical Democrats, decided to write PRO-LIFE FOR KERRY on their sign to show that it was possible for pro-life voters to support Democratic candidates. But Kerry's event staff thought differently. Hurrying over as the message bobbed in the crowd, a pair of Kerry campaign workers confronted the Headleys and asked them to put the poster down. Only "sanctioned" signs, they said, were allowed.

When John Edwards joined the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee in the summer, the campaign could have used the North Carolina Methodist much in the same way that Al Gore's campaign dispatched Joseph Lieberman to engage religious voters in 2000. Edwards carried with him a leather-bound copy of The Purpose-Driven Life, a popular devotional book by the Evangelical author and megachurch pastor Rick Warren. Edwards' copy was worn from daily reading, a discipline he shared with tens of millions of other Americans who owned the book.

But voters never learned about the vice-presidential candidate's religious reading habits. While G.O.P. strategists trumpeted the fact that Bush started each morning with a reading from a book of essays trendy in Evangelical circles, Democrats were largely oblivious to the existence of Evangelical culture. At one point during the summer of 2004, Terry McAuliffe was actually at the same event as Warren, and the two were introduced. With a good-natured smile but a blank stare, McAuliffe stuck out his hand. "Nice to meet you, Rick!" the Democratic National Committee chairman said. "And what do you do?"

Catholics were just as far off the Kerry campaign's radar screen. In the fall, a Democratic activist and Catholic in Columbus, Ohio, named Eric McFadden approached the campaign about canvassing heavily Catholic counties in Ohio. Democratic volunteers in those areas had been barraged with questions from voters who had been following the Wafer Watch, and they were desperate for materials that could provide a fuller picture of Kerry's Catholicism. McFadden wanted to deliver flyers that highlighted Kerry's faith and the drop in abortion rates during the 1990s. He approached one of the campaign's Ohio field directors for permission, explaining that he wanted to help organizers appeal to Catholic voters. Her response left him speechless: "We don't do white churches."

When Kerry did finally deliver a thoughtful speech about his faith and values, it took place little more than a week before the election. And because of staff concerns about abortion protesters, the Senator gave his faith talk not at a Catholic university in Ohio, as originally scheduled, but at a Jewish senior center in Florida, with little fanfare. Nine days later, Kerry lost the Catholic vote in Ohio by 44% to 55%. It was a six-point drop from Al Gore's showing among Catholics in that state four years earlier. Kerry lost Ohio by a margin of slightly more than 118,000 votes and, with it, the election.

Near the end of the Democratic presidential debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last month, Obama paused to offer some advice to his party. "There have been times," he said, "when our Democratic Party did not reach out as aggressively as we could to Evangelicals because the assumption was, well, they don't agree with us on choice, or they don't agree with us on gay rights, and so we just shouldn't show up." That, he argued, was a grave mistake, and it's one reason he and Clinton have empowered Evangelicals within their own campaigns. Instead of avoiding Catholic voters, they've initiated new discussions about abortion. Instead of silencing pro-life supporters, they've encouraged Democrats to show tolerance and respect. And they're both on a first-name basis with Rick Warren.

Adapted from The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap. Copyright 2008 by Amy Sullivan. To be published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Visit [XREF {http://www.thepartyfaithfulbook.com} {www.thepartyfaithfulbook.com}].