"Just because Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean got in hot water last month for calling the Republicans "pretty much a white, Christian Party" doesn't mean he's not hunting for white, Christian votes. At a meeting last week with liberal evangelical preacher Jim Wallis--which began with a prayer led by Dean's chief of staff, who is a Pentecostal minister--Dean drilled the antiabortion Wallis on how to make party rhetoric on abortion rights more values-friendly. "Nobody is pro-abortion," Dean said, according to a party official. "But do you want the government telling you what to do in your personal life?"
Dean is doing more than tinkering with the party line; he's spearheading a new campaign to woo religious voters. There's been so much outreach to religious groups in his five months at its helm that the Democratic National Committee hired an experienced Capitol Hill aide last week to help manage the effort. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have stepped up consultations with religious leaders. After taking a hit among "values" voters in the last election, Democrats are strategizing on how to play up what they call the moral--and in some cases biblical--underpinnings of their political convictions. Complementing the official effort is a crop of new, religiously affiliated advocacy groups. "Democrats had [thought] it a bit unseemly to wear your religion on your sleeve," says South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn. "But those of us who've been walking the walk . . . have decided it's time to talk the talk." The success of that effort could determine whether Democrats start winning elections again."-from the article in U.S. News and World Report.
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