Hillary Hires Evangelical Consultant

Hillary Clinton has hired an "evangelical consultant” to help woo Christian conservatives in her likely 2008 presidential campaign.

The move comes after a similar political operative successfully aided Democratic candidates in several states in the midterm elections.

More than one-quarter of the nation’s voters identify themselves as evangelical — a voter bloc that has long been courted by Republicans.

Clinton’s new hire is Burns Strider, an evangelical Christian who directs religious outreach for House Democrats and is the lead staffer for the Democrats’ Faith Working Group, headed by incoming Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina.

Incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi created the group last year when Democratic strategists observed that the party lost ground in the previous election in part because candidates failed to reach centrist and conservative voters in rural areas, who tend to be churchgoers concerned with moral issues, according to the Washington, D.C.-based publication The Hill.

Strider was an aide to Pelosi when the group was formed and joined Clyburn’s staff as policy director of the Democratic Caucus earlier this year, the paper reported.

"Observers of Clinton’s expressions of faith say religion has always been important to her, that she attended prayer group meetings while first lady, and that she joined a Senate prayer group shortly after winning election in 2000,” The Hill reports.

"Reporters anticipating Clinton’s ’08 presidential run wrongly discount her expressions of faith as cynical political maneuvering," the observers add.

Clinton is not the only potential Democratic candidate for the White House to launch efforts to appeal to religious voters.

Josh Dubois, an aide in Barack Obama’s Senate office, is heading his religious outreach. Sen. John Kerry gave a speech on "service and faith” in September at conservative Pepperdine University, and has brought in Shaun Casey, an associate professor of Christian Ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary, as a consultant on religious outreach.

Kerry also traveled recently to California for a meeting with Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church and author of the best-seller "The Purpose-Driven Life.”

Clinton’s evangelical point man, Strider, will take his cue from Mara Vanderslice, whose consulting firm Common Good Strategies helped Democratic candidates make inroads among evangelical and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Exit polls showed that Vanderslice’s candidates did about 10 percentage points better than Democrats nationally among those voters, The New York Times reports.

In Michigan, Democrat Gov. Jennifer Granholm cut significantly into the white evangelical vote that normally goes Republican. Similarly, in Ohio, Democrat Gov.-elect Ted Strickland took nearly half of the white evangelical vote. And in Pennsylvania, Sen.-elect Bob Casey won nearly a third of white evangelicals.

In all three states, Democrats began conducting well-organized outreach efforts to appeal to religious voters long before election day, according to The Hill.

Vanderslice and her business partner, Eric Sapp, urged Democrats to speak in detail about the religious basis of their policies and to buy commercials on Christian radio. In Ohio and Michigan, they even enlisted nuns to staff phone banks and call Catholic and pro-life voters to urge support for Democratic candidates.

Vanderslice has criticized Democrats’ usual reluctance to involve religion in their campaigns. She disclosed in an interview that she told candidates not to use the phrase "separation of church and state,” which does not appear in the Constitution’s language barring the establishment of religion.

Vanderslice herself didn’t become an evangelical Christian until she attended Earlham College, a Quaker school in Indiana known for its adherence to pacifism. She acknowledges that she still struggles with common evangelical ideas about abortion, homosexuality, and the literal reading of Scripture, according to the Times.

After college, Vanderslice spoke at rallies held by the AIDS activist group Act Up, which disrupted Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989 by spitting the Eucharist on the floor. In 2000, she practiced civil disobedience when she took to the streets of Seattle in a protest against the World Trade Organization.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, when Vanderslice directed religious outreach for John Kerry’s campaign, Catholic League President William Donahue denounced her as an "ultra-leftist who consorts with anti-Catholic bigots.”

Her advice was largely ignored by the Kerry campaign. But in the recent elections, the Times reports, she and partner Sapp were heeded when they "told Democratic candidates not to try to fake it, advising those of non-Christian faiths or no faith at all to talk about the origins of their sense of ethics.”