Consultant Teaching Democrats How to be Religious Hypocrites - Just Like Republicans!

DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, NY TIMES - Party strategists and nonpartisan pollsters credit the operative, Mara Vanderslice, and her 2-year-old consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, with helping a handful of Democratic candidates make deep inroads among white evangelical and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Exit polls show that Ms. Vanderslice's candidates did 10 percentage points or so better than Democrats nationally among those voters, who make up about a third of the electorate. . .

Democratic officials in several states said Ms. Vanderslice and her business partner, Eric Sapp, pushed sometimes reluctant Democrats to speak publicly, early and in detail about the religious underpinnings of their policy views. They persuaded candidates to speak at conservative religious schools and to buy early commercials on Christian radio. They organized meetings and conference calls for candidates to speak privately with moderate and conservative members of the clergy.

In Michigan, they helped the state's Democratic Party follow up on these meetings by incorporating recognizably biblical language into its platform. In Michigan and Ohio, they enlisted nuns in phone banks to urge voters who were Catholic or opposed abortion rights to support Democratic candidates, with some of the nuns saying they were making the case in religious terms.

But Ms. Vanderslice's efforts to integrate faith into Democratic campaigns troubles some liberals, who accuse her of mimicking the Christian right. Dr. Welton Gaddy, president of the liberal Interfaith Alliance, said her encouragement of such overt religiosity raised "red flags" about the traditional separation of church and state.

"I don't want any politician prostituting the sanctity of religion," Mr. Gaddy said, adding that nonbelievers also "have a right to feel they are represented at the highest levels of government."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/us/politics/26faith.html?ref=us