Book says Bush aides derided evangelists
WASHINGTON -- A new book by a former White House official says President Bush's top political advisers privately ridiculed evangelical supporters as ``nuts" and ``goofy" while embracing them in public and using their votes to help win elections.
The former official also writes that the White House office of faith-based initiatives, which Bush promoted as a nonpolitical effort to support religious social service organizations, was told to host preelection events designed to mobilize religious voters who would probably favor Republican candidates.
The assertions by David Kuo, the former number two official in the faith-based initiatives program, have rattled Republican strategists already struggling to persuade evangelical voters to turn out this fall for the GOP.
Some conservatives lamented yesterday that the book, ``Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," also comes in the midst of the scandal involving former representative Mark Foley's interest in male congressional pages, another threat to conservative turnout in competitive House and Senate races.
The book is scheduled to hit stores Monday, but the White House denied some assertions yesterday as excerpts began leaking out.
In the book, Kuo, who quit the White House in 2003, accuses Karl Rove's political staff of cynically hijacking the faith-based initiatives idea for electoral gain. 