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EVANGELICALS FOR AGNOSTICS. To vaguely weigh in on whether Christians are getting used by the right or taking it over, this point of Amy's struck me as interesting:
I, and many Democrats, supported expanding the charitable tax exemption so that more Americans could donate more money to charity. I think you'll agree that it was a supremely conservative idea--increase private giving to private charities so they can do good work without the public sector getting involved. It was the most significant and dramatic part of Bush's original faith-based plan, and it would have resulted in enormous injections of funds into the charitable sector--certainly much more than the faith-based initiative has already dispersed. (One respected estimate projected an increase of $160 billion in charitable giving over ten years.)Unfortunately--and this gets back to our original question of whether the White House has delivered on its promises to religious conservatives--the Bush administration turned its back on the charitable giving provision. Why? Because it couldn't justify the cost of both that and the elimination of the estate tax. It shouldn't be a surprise that the estate tax won out, but what is most disappointing is that it actually hurts charitable giving even more. One popular way of getting around the estate tax for many wealthy individuals has been to donate money to charities and write off the gift. Eliminating the estate tax cost more than $5 billion per year in charitable giving by those wealthy Americans who can keep their money to themselves now.I'm rather agnostic (ha!) on whether Democrats should be targeting evangelicals, but they can surely be targeting repulsive policy decisions like that one. It's a precious instance where Democrats could champion a policy consonant with their principles and popular with white churchgoers. Go in for such easy targets and maybe they won't have to hunt down so many hard ones.As for the larger debate on whether to target evangelicals, such discussions always put me in the mind of a report finding that, if you put together the findings of all those studies saying that X amount of productivity is wiped out by the flu, and Y from smoking in cars, and Z from picking your nose, you're eventually left with a number far larger than the entire global economy. Democrats, it seems, are supposed to be fighting for libertarians, Southerners, Westerners, churchgoers, Indians, blacks, whites, "ideopolises," rural voters, and all the rest. Add them up and I'm sure you'll have a couple electorates stacked atop each other. Seems to me the party would be better off crafting a compelling message that assembles a broad coalition, not adopting the specificity needed to wrest a single group.
--Ezra Klein
