Bush Seeks to Mobilize Religious Conservatives
By David Morgan
Reuters
Thursday 01 July 2004
Washington - President Bush, seeking to mobilize religious conservatives
for his reelection campaign, has asked church-going volunteers to turn over
church membership directories, campaign officials said on Thursday.
In a move sharply criticized both by religious leaders and civil
libertarians, the Bush-Cheney campaign has issued a guide listing about
two-dozen "duties" and a series of deadlines for organizing support among
conservative church congregations.
A copy of the guide obtained by Reuters directs religious volunteers to
send church directories to state campaign committees, identify new churches
that can be organized by the Bush campaign and talk to clergy about holding
voter registration drives.
The document, distributed to campaign coordinators across the country
earlier this year, also recommends that volunteers distribute voter guides
in church and use Sunday service programs for get-out-the-vote drives.
"We expect this election to be potentially as close as 2000, so every
vote counts and it's important to reach out to every single supporter of
President Bush," campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
But the Rev. Richard Land, who deals with ethics and religious liberty
issues for the Southern Baptist Convention, a key Bush constituency, said he
was "appalled."
"First of all, I would not want my church directories being used that
way," he told Reuters in an interview, predicting failure for the Bush plan.
The conservative Protestant denomination, whose 16 million members
strongly backed Bush in 2000, held regular drives that encouraged
church-goers to "vote their values," said Land.
"But it's one thing for us to do that. It's a totally different thing
for a partisan campaign to come in and try to organize a church. A lot of
pastors are going to say: 'Wait a minute, bub'," he added.
The guide surfaced as a spate of opinion polls showed Bush's reelection
campaign facing a tough battle.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed Bush running neck-and-neck with
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry among registered voters, 47
percent of whom said they now believed the president had misled Americans
about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The Bush campaign has also been spending heavily on television ads, only
to see the president's approval ratings slump to new lows.
Stanzel said the campaign ended the month of June with $64 million on
hand. He had no figures on how much Bush has raised in June. At the end of
May, Bush had raised $213.4 million and spent all but $63 million.
The latest effort to marshal religious support also drew fire from civil
liberties activists concerned about the constitutional separation of church
and state.
"Any coordination between the Bush campaign and church leaders would
clearly be illegal," said a statement from the activist group Americans
United for Separation of Church and State.
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