St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Minister mobilizes Missouri Democrats to take back religious turf

September 30, 2004, Thursday, BC cycle

For the Rev. David Keyes, it was a moment of grass-roots poetry. Keyes is the Kerry-Edwards election campaign's new (and first) religious outreach coordinator for Missouri, and on Monday afternoon he sat at a table at the campaign's St. Louis storefront headquarters in a Shrewsbury strip mall with six religious leaders, lay and ordained.

Keyes walked them through the sequence of speakers for an interfaith "prayer potluck" rally that night in Brentwood.
But in his zeal to include speakers of varying calibrations of faiths, denominations, genders, races and ages, Keyes had overlooked one of the most visible: Protestant women.

"Give me a minute," said Rabbi Jeffrey Stiffman, recently retired from Congregation Shaare Emeth, as he whipped out his cell phone and began dialing. The Rev. Bill Hutchison, a retired Roman Catholic priest, borrowed a cell phone and did the same. In no time, the group had two Protestant women lined up to speak.

Keyes' is using his story of how he became the Democrats' religious point man in Missouri to try to mobilize the state's Democrats to take back some of the religious turf analysts say conservatives have claimed for years.

"Democrats have ceded ground to the Republicans for 20 to 30 years because Democrats avoid talk of religion and spiritual values," said the Rev. Jim Wallis, a liberal activist and editor of Sojourners magazine. "And that turned out to be a mistake."

Democrats knew that religion would play a central role in this year's election race. In early July, a Bush-Cheney re-election campaign memo surfaced with instructions for state religious outreach coordinators. The directions were to occur throughout the campaign and contained such duties as "send your Church Directory to your State Bush-Cheney '04 Headquarters" and "identify another conservative church in your community who we can organize for Bush."

Later in the month, the Kansas City-based National Catholic Reporter reported that the Republican National Committee had asked Catholics to provide copies of parish directories for the Bush campaign.

At the same time, the Bush campaign's religion machine was revving up, the Democrats' internal efforts at religious organizing were sputtering.

Over the summer, the conservative Catholic League silenced the religious outreach directors for both the Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee, blasting them as "left-wing activists" and pointing out their ties to activist liberal groups.

But at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in late July, a group called People of Faith for Kerry held an interfaith lunch for 100 religious and lay leaders. The Democratic National Committee's chief of staff, Leah Doughtry, also a Protestant minister, assured the group they could be "Democrats and people of faith at the same time," according to reports.

Steven Waldman, editor of Beliefnet.com, a Web site that deals with spiritual matters, said the renewed effort toward invigorating the religious wing of the Democratic Party came, in part, from former Clinton staffers Michael McCurry, Paul Begala and John Podesta, who saw polls showing the perception of Kerry's lack of religious conviction as potentially disastrous for his campaign.

"A lot of former Clinton people who were complaining from the outside are now helping on the inside," said Waldman. "They were pushing hard for this, and they've had a real impact."

Michael Meehan, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, confirmed that McCurry, Begala and Podesta, among others, were influential in setting religious outreach strategy for the Kerry campaign. He said that there are now 21 states in which the campaign was focusing on religious voters. Fifteen of those states, like Missouri, have a full-time volunteer working to organize religious voters for the Democratic ticket.

In Missouri, according to a recent MSNBC/Knight Ridder poll of battleground states, the question of moral values is more important to voters than health care and just 1 percentage point less important than Iraq. In the same poll, 47 percent of Missourians said they consider themselves "evangelical Christians" or "born again." Another recent poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center put the number at 36 percent. And 64 percent of Missourians said they attend religious services at least three times a month, with 45 percent saying they attend once a week.

Given the numbers, and the common wisdom that those who attend religious services regularly vote Republican, the Bush campaign says it is not worried about the late effort by the Kerry campaign.

"We feel good about where we are," said state Bush campaign director Lloyd Smith. "We were doing this a long time before their potlucks." Smith said Republicans had identified 400 "church coordinators" throughout the state who will act as liaisons to the Bush campaign. The goal, he said, is to have each of those coordinators get their friends and church acquaintances to the polls in November.

"Potluck suppers aren't going to win people over," said Smith. "What they're going to find is that most people in the pews across this state agree with George W. Bush."

Keyes, a Kansas City native, was tapped to work on Missouri's religious voters three weeks ago. He asked the campaign how he could help, then consulted with Missourians who wanted to volunteer for a religious movement within the campaign.

In a conference call, Keyes and his volunteers decided to begin the faith-and-vote effort by holding a series of "prayer potluck" rallies in five key parts of the state - Brentwood, Liberty, Springfield, Jefferson City and Rolla - to energize religious Democrats and undecideds.

Keyes is married to Judith Droz Keyes, the widow of Kerry's fellow swift-boat commander and friend, Donald Droz, and adoptive father to Droz's daughter. He took time out from his job as an interim minister for Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Christ congregations to volunteer for his old family friend, John Kerry.

At the rallies across the state on Monday night, about 400 people turned out, according to organizers. Former U.S. Sen. Jean Carnahan spoke at the event in Liberty. She called it "one of the warmest gatherings I've ever attended," adding, "the audience was very receptive to the message, which was that it's all right to be a Democrat and a Christian."

At the rally at the Brentwood Community Center on Monday night, about 100 Kerry supporters gathered to pray, testify and sing. The final verse of "Kumbaya" became "someone's voting, Lord, Kumbaya."

Khaled Abdel-Hamid, 45, an allergist who lives in Manchester, said he attended the rally because the Bush administration "tries to say that if you have morals, you go with the Republicans, which is absurd."

Sara Barwinski, 49, a social worker from Bridgeton, said the Bush campaign "doesn't have a monopoly on people of faith and conviction," and that she was there to help with the "effort to let people know that people of faith can care about a range of issues."

As the evening's main speaker, Keyes told the story of his family's relationship with John Kerry. He talked about Don Droz, the Naval officer whose widow he would eventually marry, and when he got the part of the story where Droz was killed in an ambush in Vietnam, he had to pause to compose himself. "I'm sorry," he said. "I've never told this story in public before."

He then told the audience that Kerry is a religious man. "I know that he is a man of deep faith. He is a devout Catholic who is reverent about attending Mass. That's a good word for John, and you should take that word back with you when you talk about him: reverent," he said.

"He has a reverence for God, he has a reverence for the Church, he has a reverence for the country, and for the traditions that made this country great. He has a reverence for human life." The audience erupted in applause.

But for all the emotion and passion involved, some say, with less than five weeks to go until election day, the Kerry campaign's efforts may be a case of too little, too late.

Bush campaign spokesman Lloyd Smith said the Kerry campaign would have a tough time gaining grass-roots support with religious voters at this point. "I think that they're going to find the waters extremely chilly if they try to get in," he said.