conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about George, Bush, U.S with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Political Fictions'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first paragraph for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Political Fictions
  This use of "faith-based" is artful, and worth study. Goodwill was founded by a Methodist minister and run during its early years out of the Morgan Memorial Chapel in Boston, which would seem to qualify it as based in faith, although not, in the sense that Olasky apparently construes the phrase, as "faith-based." "Faith-based," then, is, as Olasky uses it, a phrase with a special meaning, a code phrase, employed to suggest that certain worthy organizations have been prevented from receiving government funding solely by virtue of their religious affiliation. This is misleading, since "religiously affiliated" organizations (for example Catholic Charities) can and do receive such funding. The organizations that have not are those deemed "pervasively sectarian," a judgment based on the extent to which they proselytize, or make religious worship or instruction a condition of receiving aid. This, the Supreme Court has to date maintained, would violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment, the original intent of which Olasky believes to have been warped. "Daniel and I spent some time talking about what happened 210 years ago," he wrote. "There's nothing about 'separation of church and state.' That was Thomas Jefferson's personal expression in a letter written over a decade after the amendment was adopted.... The founding fathers would be aghast at court rulings that make our part of the world safe for moral anarchy."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Olasky and Daniel for example visit "the praying tailback," Herb Lusk, "the first National Football League player to use the end zone as the pulpit by crouching prayerfully following a touchdown." As pastor of the Greater Exodus Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Lusk does accept government funding for the church's welfare-to-work program, but works around it: "No, we don't talk about Christ during the training, but we promote our offer of a free lunch for participants, with Bible teaching during it." "Evangelism is central to everything we do," Olasky is told by a Dallas woman, Kathy Dudley, who left her suburban home for the inner city, where she defines her mission as "discipleship." "Early in the 1990s," Olasky reports, "one official offered her a $170,000 grant, but she asked, 'If I take this money and hire a housing director, I will hire a Christian and expect a certain standard of behavior. If the director has sex outside of marriage, I will fire him immediately. Do you have a problem with this?' Yes, the official told her. She spurned the grant."
  The Bible clearly shows the error both of feminists who claim no differences between men and women, and of sexual segregationists who argue that women are to be concerned "only" with marriage and motherhood.... Men go wrong, biblically, by either abdicating or waxing arrogant, either by running from God-given functions or refusing to hear what women have to say. In 1 Samuel 25, Abigail knows that her husband, Nabal, is a fool; when she acts to save her whole household, David tells her, "May you be blessed for your good judgment." I know that my wife often has better judgment than I, and that if I am not to be Nabal Olasky I should listen. And so should we all. Today, some Christian men believe women should be co-leaders in everything. That leaves many men feeling emasculated and many women wishing that guys would step up and make a decision, already. Other Christian men go to the opposite extreme and assert that married women should not even be studying the Bible by themselves or in groups with other women; they should be taught only by their husbands.
  It was 1993 when Marvin Olasky was first called to meet with Bush, who was at the time shopping for issues with which to defeat the incumbent governor of Texas, Ann Richards. Olasky and Bush, along with Bush adviser Karl Rove, talked for an hour, during which, according to Olasky, Bush "asked questions that went to the heart of issues involving children born out of wedlock and men slowly dying from drug abuse on the streets." Bush did not have occasion to call again on Olasky until 1995, when, as governor, he saw the political potential in taking up the side of a Christian drug program called Teen Challenge, which state regulators had tried to shut down because it refused to comply with certain state regulations, including one that required drug counselors to be trained in conventional anti-addiction techniques. (Conventional anti-addiction techniques in this country are largely based on the twelve-step regime, which carefully refers to an unspecified "Higher Power," or "God as we understand Him." The anti-addiction technique of choice at Teen Challenge was, in the words of its executive director, "Jesus Christ.") Over his next few years as governor, Bush not only made Texas the first state to sanction the redirection of state funds into faith-based programs but virtually dismantled state regulation of such programs, accruing, in the course of this pioneering endeavor, considerable political capital from the religious right. "An opportunity arose for a far-sighted governor to take the lead" is how Olasky describes this. "George W. Bush was a natural, both because of his father's earlier interest in the 'thousand points of light' and his own personal, faith-based change in 1986 from heavy drinking at times to abstinence from alcohol."
  The public, on the other hand, while morally offended by the president's misbehavior and skeptical of the content of his character, has been steadfast in its belief that Clinton's personal failings did not compromise his ability to function successfully as chief executive. Each new public revelation of titillating details served mainly to reinforce their view that the effort to force the president from office was both unwise and, at least in part, politically motivated. This gap between Washington and public opinion had to close before the president's future could be resolved. Now that the election returns are in, we know how that gap will close. The message from the election is crystal-clear: The Washington community will have to accommodate itself to the views of the country.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The September Sunday morning on which Abraham H. Foxman suggested to Cokie Roberts and the Reverend Pat Robertson that an excessive campaign emphasis on faith could "move us off that experience of two hundred years" ("So there's a tiny, tiny minority who consider themselves atheist," Pat Robertson said, "and you can't surrender the deeply held religious beliefs of the entire majority to please some tiny minority") followed several days of op-ed and talk-show debate prompted by the letter, making the same point, that Mr. Foxman had sent to Senator Lieberman after the latter's "new spiritual awakening" event in Detroit. In the course of this debate, the appropriate role of religion in American life had been discussed at some length. It had been widely agreed that the establishment clause of the First Amendment had been, to the extent that it had ensured the disestablishment of the Anglican or Episcopal Church, a good idea. It had also been widely agreed that the aim of the Founders had been not "atheism" (the straw man from the Scopes trial curiously back among us) but "diversity of faith." There had been areas of disagreement, hotly argued but narrow. Some held that one's faith was best practiced in private, others that faith practiced in private was no faith at all; a difference, as differences go, not entirely unlike the 1844 Philadelphia riot in which six people were killed over the issue of which version of the Ten Commandments should be posted in public schools.
  Lieberman is not the first politician to say how important faith is to our democracy. President Dwight Eisenhower offered the nation this notable sentiment: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief—and I don't care what it is." Today's discussion about religion and politics is much more serious than it was in the "I don't care what it is" past memorialized by Eisenhower. That's what makes so many people uncomfortable.
  This was a meaningful shift in the national political dialogue. Politics, it had been until recently understood, is push and pull, give and take, the art of the possible, an essentially pragmatic process by which the differing needs and rights of the nation's citizens get balanced and to some degree met. The insertion into this process of a claim to faith, or to "the high moral ground," it also had been until recently understood, is perilous, permissible if at all only at moments of such urgent gravity as to warrant its inherent danger, which is that the needs and rights of some citizens might be overridden to accommodate the needs and rights of those holding the high ground. This was not such a moment in American life. The nation was not at war. A majority of its citizens seemed to understand that the demonstration of "full remorse" recently demanded of its president would prove less personally meaningful to their families than the skill or lack of skill with which he guided them through the rapids of the global economy.
  The possible "legacy" of that president was popularly discussed in negative terms, as the redeeming grail he had hoped for and lost, but on any reasonable scale his legacy was already sizable: the country he would hand over to either Governor Bush or Vice President Gore was one in which median household income had reached an all-time high, the unemployment rate was at its lowest point in three decades, the rate of violent crime was down, and the digital national-debt clock in Manhattan was running, until its creator allowed that the device had outlived its effectiveness and stopped it, backward. It had been Clinton's "legacy," in short, to create the very conditions that had early on led the academic forecasters to call a presidential victory by the incumbent party the most probable outcome of the November 2000 election.
  The logic here, and it was the same logic that surfaced in response to the Lieberman nomination, was that of the origin myth, in which "the populace," once warned, could yet cast out its wicked allegiance to its disgraced leader and be saved before the final Rapture. This fable had been adjusted and trimmed with each retelling, yet one element, the disgraced leader, remained fixed, the rock on which the Bush campaign might have foundered early had the Gore campaign itself, in search of the chimerical "undecided" voter, not rushed to enter the fable's fatal eddy. The distinct possibility that an entire generation of younger voters might see no point in choosing between two candidates retelling the same remote story could benefit only one campaign, the Republican, and the failure of the Democratic campaign to recognize this could yet neutralize the advantage of the legacy it has worked so assiduously to disavow.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Foxman suggested to Cokie Roberts and the Reverend Pat Robertson that an excessive campaign emphasis on faith could "move us off that experience of two hundred years" ("So there's a tiny, tiny minority who consider themselves atheist," Pat Robertson said, "and you can't surrender the deeply held religious beliefs of the entire majority to please some tiny minority") followed several days of op-ed and talk-show debate prompted by the letter, making the same point, that Mr. Foxman had sent to Senator Lieberman after the latter's "new spiritual awakening" event in Detroit. In the course of this debate, the appropriate role of religion in American life had been discussed at some length. It had been widely agreed that the establishment clause of the First Amendment had been, to the extent that it had ensured the disestablishment of the Anglican or Episcopal Church, a good idea. It had also been widely agreed that the aim of the Founders had been not "atheism" (the straw man from the Scopes trial curiously back among us) but "diversity of faith." There had been areas of disagreement, hotly argued but narrow. Some held that one's faith was best practiced in private, others that faith practiced in private was no faith at all; a difference, as differences go, not entirely unlike the 1844 Philadelphia riot in which six people were killed over the issue of which version of the Ten Commandments should be posted in public schools.
  Lieberman is not the first politician to say how important faith is to our democracy. President Dwight Eisenhower offered the nation this notable sentiment: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief—and I don't care what it is." Today's discussion about religion and politics is much more serious than it was in the "I don't care what it is" past memorialized by Eisenhower. That's what makes so many people uncomfortable.
  This was a meaningful shift in the national political dialogue. Politics, it had been until recently understood, is push and pull, give and take, the art of the possible, an essentially pragmatic process by which the differing needs and rights of the nation's citizens get balanced and to some degree met. The insertion into this process of a claim to faith, or to "the high moral ground," it also had been until recently understood, is perilous, permissible if at all only at moments of such urgent gravity as to warrant its inherent danger, which is that the needs and rights of some citizens might be overridden to accommodate the needs and rights of those holding the high ground. This was not such a moment in American life. The nation was not at war. A majority of its citizens seemed to understand that the demonstration of "full remorse" recently demanded of its president would prove less personally meaningful to their families than the skill or lack of skill with which he guided them through the rapids of the global economy.
  The possible "legacy" of that president was popularly discussed in negative terms, as the redeeming grail he had hoped for and lost, but on any reasonable scale his legacy was already sizable: the country he would hand over to either Governor Bush or Vice President Gore was one in which median household income had reached an all-time high, the unemployment rate was at its lowest point in three decades, the rate of violent crime was down, and the digital national-debt clock in Manhattan was running, until its creator allowed that the device had outlived its effectiveness and stopped it, backward. It had been Clinton's "legacy," in short, to create the very conditions that had early on led the academic forecasters to call a presidential victory by the incumbent party the most probable outcome of the November 2000 election.
  The logic here, and it was the same logic that surfaced in response to the Lieberman nomination, was that of the origin myth, in which "the populace," once warned, could yet cast out its wicked allegiance to its disgraced leader and be saved before the final Rapture. This fable had been adjusted and trimmed with each retelling, yet one element, the disgraced leader, remained fixed, the rock on which the Bush campaign might have foundered early had the Gore campaign itself, in search of the chimerical "undecided" voter, not rushed to enter the fable's fatal eddy. The distinct possibility that an entire generation of younger voters might see no point in choosing between two candidates retelling the same remote story could benefit only one campaign, the Republican, and the failure of the Democratic campaign to recognize this could yet neutralize the advantage of the legacy it has worked so assiduously to disavow.