Word: bush
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...relative neophyte to lead the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Joshua DuBois, the 26-year-old Pentecostal pastor who served as director of religious affairs for Obama's Presidential campaign, will oversee an office with a broader mission than it held under George W. Bush. Obama has charged DuBois - who will lead a council of 25 influential religious and nonprofit leaders - with helping both faith-based and secular groups galvanize their communities by providing everything from social services to job training. His appointment is a gamble for Obama, who risks lending ammunition to critics...
...ambitious task down a path studded with political mines. Although partnerships between faith-based organizations and government have existed for decades and were reinvigorated during the Clinton Administration, the issue became a partisan football during Bush's time in office. Even some of the faith-based initiative's earliest supporters - including Republican Congressman Mark Souder of Indiana and former office director John DiIulio - strongly criticized the way the Bush White House handled the effort and cut funds for social services. "The Bush Administration pushed hard on the things that created the most controversy and made it look more controversial than...
...those controversial points was the question of whether faith-based groups that receive government funding should be allowed to hire only individuals who share their religious beliefs. Early in Bush's first term, he signed a series of Executive Orders exempting religious organizations from nondiscrimination laws...
...statement caused an immediate uproar within the ranks of Obama's religious supporters, who pushed him to back off from the promise to undo Bush's Executive Order. He has not done so publicly, but several of them insist that Obama and his aides have given them private assurances that there will be no rapid movement to change the status quo with regard to religious hiring. If so, it would be a rare case of political ham-handness by the Obama team, because his secular supporters say they have been assured that the hiring change will take place...
Another of Obama's Zanesville promises will pose an enormous bureaucratic challenge to his faith-based operation. "We will also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work," he vowed in July. It was a pledge Bush made as well in the early days of the faith-based initiative, insisting that "results" would be the only criterion by which programs were judged. But measuring the effectiveness of programs that receive government money turns out to be a monumental task, and the Bush Administration never did implement a widespread assessment program. In the current economic climate...