http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601101.html

Losing Faith in the President
Critical Book by Ex-Staffer in Religion-Based Effort Is Out

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 17, 2006; Page A19

White House officials realized they had a problem, former staffer David Kuo 
writes in his new book, "Tempting Faith," when they saw how a panel rated 
the first applications for grants under the "faith-based initiative," 
President Bush's vaunted effort to help religious charities.

On a scale of 1 to 100, respected national organizations such as Big 
Brothers Big Sisters of America scored in the mid-70s to mid-80s, "while 
something called Jesus and Friends Ministry from California, a group with 
little more than a post office box," scored 89 and Pat Robertson's overseas 
aid organization, Operation Blessing, scored 95, according to Kuo.

David Kuo spent three years in the White House Office of Faith-Based and 
Community Initiatives.

"It was obvious that the ratings were a farce," he writes, adding that he 
and other White House aides feared that if the list became public, "it 
would show once and for all that the initiative was purely about paying off 
political friends for their support."

Portions of Kuo's explosive book, which formally went on sale yesterday, 
were leaked last week by MSNBC. They brought heated denials from White 
House press secretary Tony Snow and other current and former Bush 
administration officials.

The book is full of insider anecdotes and details, many of which were not 
reported by MSNBC, and some of which can be read as defending rather than 
attacking the Bush White House.

In the case of the grant applications, for example, Kuo says that the 
ratings obviously favored conservative Christian groups but that the White 
House "really did have nothing to do with" it. The problem, he asserts, is 
that the "peer review" panel chosen by the Department of Health and Human 
Services came from the "faith-based policy world."

"There are, at most, 100 people in think tanks, foundations, major 
nonprofits and the like who really work on these issues and who support the 
president. Virtually all of them are very compassionate and dedicated 
evangelical Christians who tend to be politically conservative," Kuo 
writes. "They were supposed to review the application in a religiously 
neutral fashion. . . . But their biases were transparent."

Kuo tells a story about meeting a member of the review panel at a party. He 
says she giggled as she recalled, "when I saw one of those non-Christian 
groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave 
them a zero." Kuo says he laughed but, at the same time, was aghast.

"Some in the press would later 'expose' that we in the White House had 
doled out grants to friends. They were technically wrong," he writes. "We 
didn't do it. We didn't have to. The White House influence was so great 
that its will was carried out by other appointees in other departments 
without thinking."

In addition to being a memoir of his three years in the White House, where 
Kuo was deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community 
Initiatives until December 2003, the book is a saga of falling in, and out 
of, love with conservative Christian politics.

Kuo, 38, recounts that in college, he was a liberal who interned for Sen. 
Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). But he got a girlfriend pregnant, and they 
went together to an abortion clinic. "We regretted it. We were relieved. I 
knew what we'd done. I had no idea what we'd done," he writes.

Haunted, Kuo became an antiabortion activist. When he moved to Washington 
to work for the National Right to Life Committee and, later, for the CIA, 
he began attending First Baptist Church in Alexandria. It was there, he 
said in an interview yesterday, "that I learned that being a good Christian 
means being a conservative Republican."

Before the age of 27, Kuo took William J. Bennett as a mentor, wrote 
speeches for Ralph Reed and Robertson, and was domestic policy adviser to 
then-Sen. John D. Ashcroft (R-Mo.). In 1998, he joined George W. Bush's 
campaign for president.

Kuo said he was "dazzled" by Bush's talk of compassion. But in his telling, 
the administration's actions never matched its rhetoric. During the 
scramble to win tax cuts, for example, the promise of $8 billion per year 
for charities was scrapped.

To try to climb up the White House's list of priorities, Kuo said, he and 
others working in the faith-based office offered to politicize their 
efforts. The White House political affairs office gave them a map of 
battleground states in 2002, and they used it to plan conferences to win 
support for GOP candidates. "Smart politics, bad morals," he said in 
retrospect.

In 2003, Kuo was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. It is still 
growing slowly, he said, giving him perhaps five or 10 years to live.

"I feel a pressing spiritual need to say what I think is important," he 
said. "And I really think that what is important is to be able to warn 
Christians about politics, that they should not throw so much at politics, 
because they're being used, and it will not answer the problems, and it 
corrupts the name of the God we're trying to serve."

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