The week’s political news had reporters in Washington working overtime. The Senate passed a $1.35 trillion tax cut, the biggest in 20 years. The House approved an education bill that would require the states, for the first time, to test students and identify failing schools. The Senate finally (if barely) confirmed Theodore Olson as solicitor general. And, oh yes, James Jeffords of Vermont quit the Republican party, thereby enabling Democrats to gain control of the Senate and ending, prematurely, the GOP’s first chance at unified government in 50 years. The president also happened to give a commencement speech at Notre Dame — only to see it crowded out by all the other news. It addressed big ideas, including compassion, citizenship, and poverty, and it raised important issues. It’s worth some notice — since it may mean more over the long term than all these other events. Bush began by recalling a commencement speech made by Lyndon Johnson 37 years ago. This was the speech at the University of Michigan in which Johnson called for a War on Poverty. Bush quoted Johnson’s challenge: “Will you decide to leave the future a society where a man is condemned to hopelessness because he was born poor? Or will you join to wipe out poverty in this land?” Bush didn’t take exception to Johnson’s endorsement of what we all know to be impossible — an actual end to poverty — perhaps because he knows that we all know that. Indeed, he used the term “War on Poverty” without irony, describing it as an undertaking of “noble intentions” that established “a federal commitment to the poor” — one that he, Bush, vowed to keep. Bush even credited the War on Poverty with some “enduring successes,” such as Head Start, which is enduring but not a success. Fortunately, Bush didn’t spend long on the War on Poverty’s ostensible successes but got quickly to its enduring negatives — how welfare entitlements became “an enemy of personal effort and responsibility.” The 1996 welfare reform fixed that, he said, by imposing a limit on benefits and requiring work as a condition for receiving them. Welfare reform thus repudiated the very premise of the War on Poverty — that the poor are helpless victims of society. Bush, however, didn’t go into this, nor did he point out what is now the consensus view — that through virtuous behavior many who are poor can exit from poverty. Instead, he emphasized that poverty remains because “the hardest problems remain — people with far fewer skills and greater barriers to work, people with complex human problems, like illiteracy and addiction, abuse and mental illness.” Notably, Bush left off this list what is widely agreed to be the hardest of the hard problems causing poverty — family decomposition. “The rise of the single-parent family,” writes Joel Schwartz in his recent book Fighting Poverty with Virtue, “poses grave difficulties for the proper socialization of a great many of the children of the poor.” What public policy might do to prevent family decomposition is a big question with no clear answer. You can imagine what might have happened had Bush engaged the issue. Dan Quayle did that in his Murphy Brown speech, only to find himself caught up for months afterwards in the sex-and-family culture wars. Bush, perhaps for good reason, chose to avoid this controversy. Maybe he avoided it because he wanted to stay, as they say, on message, the message being an appeal to the non-poor to display the virtue of compassionate citizenship. “The War on Poverty,” Bush said, “turned too many citizens into bystanders, convinced that compassion had become the work of government alone.” Bush wants each of these bystanders to help bear another’s burden. “Much of today’s poverty has more to do with troubled lives than a troubled economy,” Bush said. “And often when a life is broken, it can only be restored by another caring, concerned human being. The answer for an abandoned child is not a job requirement — it is the loving presence of a mentor. The answer to addiction is not a demand for self-sufficiency — it is personal support on the hard road to recovery.” Bush could have ended his remarks here. Actually, he was only warming to his main subject — his Faith-Based and Community Initiative. Compassion, he said, often works best “on a small and human scale,” but there aren’t enough small groups offering compassion. “Our society must enlist, equip, and empower” such groups. This, as he pointed out, is what his initiative hopes to bring about. Ultimately it contemplates the emergence of what he called “a caring society.” Bush described the elements of his initiative, including the expansion of “charitable choice,” which is the principle that faith-based organizations shouldn’t be discriminated against on grounds of religion when competing for social-service contracts. In defense of this principle, Bush said, “Government should never fund the teaching of faith, but it should support the good works of the faithful.” Bush didn’t pursue this further, yet there is an interesting issue here: What if the primary effect of government support of the good works of the faithful is to advance the faithful’s religion? The Supreme Court has said that a government action which has the primary effect of advancing religion is unconstitutional. Should it be? Not too long ago, it was not. By pursuing charitable choice, Bush may reopen important questions of constitutional law. Down the road, his initiative could begin a move away from the secularism that has for the past 40 years dominated our public policies and our constitutional law, and lead us seriously to consider a new paradigm for the role of religion in public life. But the more immediate question is whether Bush’s faith-based initiative can make a difference in the short term. Prospects in Congress are questionable. Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania complained last week that charitable choice was a “hot-button issue.” Heaven forbid that our elected officials would have to deal with a controversial issue! But the good news, as his Notre Dame speech shows, is that the president is serious about his initiative. What’s more, he has cast the initiative in terms — the reduction of poverty — that might eventually appeal to Democrats, whom he especially needs now that Jeffords has bolted. But whether the initiative succeeds on the Hill — even whether it succeeds as a poverty-fighting measure — is not the whole story. It may not even be most of the story. If President Bush uses his bully pulpit to encourage the private sector to stop discriminating in its charitable contributions against faith-based groups, that could well make a big difference. More broadly still, the president’s initiative could stimulate debate about the relation of faith and politics in America, and could force consideration of the virtues of a self-governing people and their relation to religious belief. George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative is bold and important, and even politicians’ reluctance to deal with “hot-button” issues won’t and shouldn’t make the debate surrounding this particular issue go away. — Terry Eastland and William Kristol
