Senator Santorum and the Poor

The story on Senator Rick Santorum in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine is quite interesting.  A recurring theme in it is that Santorum makes at least a good-faith effort to bring Catholic faith to bear not only on issues like abortion and homosexuality, but also on government efforts to assist the poor (through funding of private charities).  For example, Joe Lieberman is quoted as saying:

''People associate him just with these [sexual] issues. . . .  But he is more complex than that.  He has a faith-based concern about poverty, and he's prepared to fight for more money than the administration wants to allot.''

The story also cites David Kuo, former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who complains that the Republican Party is concerned "too little with poverty":

[Kuo] considered Santorum the exception.  ''He was a singular voice in Republican leadership fighting for antipoverty legislation,'' Kuo said. ''He kept pushing it.  I was in meetings when people would start rolling their eyes when he started talking about it.  It is very much at odds with the public perception of him.  He fought behind the scenes where nobody could see it.  His compassion is genuine.''

This is the same Mr. Kuo who explained late last year on Beliefnet how President Bush's promise of "compassionate conservatism" remains "unfulfilled in spirit and in fact" in part because of pervasive "indifference" to the issue in the administration and in the Republican Party (not by the president, but by the people who actually staff the White House, the Congress, and the agencies):

In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. The Compassion Capital Fund has received a cumulative total of $100 million during the past four years.  And new programs including those for children of prisoners, at-risk youth, and prisoners reentering society have received a little more than $500 million over four years--or approximately $6.3 billion less than the promised $6.8 billion. . . .

In December 2001, for instance, Sen. Daschle approached the Domestic Policy Council with an offer to pass a charity relief bill that contained many of the president's campaign tax incentive policies plus new money for the widely-popular and faith-based-friendly Social Services Block Grant.  The White House legislative affairs office rolled their eyes while others on senior staff yawned.  We had to leave the offer on the table.

To be sure, Kuo also emphasized that the Democrats' "knee-jerk opposition" to greater funding of religious entities, based on "hackneyed church-state scare rhetoric," has likewise greatly hampered the initiative.  "At the end of the day, both parties played to stereotype -- Republicans were indifferent to the poor and the Democrats were allergic to faith."

Let's recognize Sen. Santorum for bringing a Catholic moral vision to bear on other issues in addition to abortion, homosexuality, and embryonic stem cells.  I didn't hear much at the time about his push for more anti-poverty money; I suppose that few media outlets find it remunerative to do stories that emphasize non-stereotypical behavior like that.  (But let's recognize that the Times, and reporter Michael Sokolove, played the point fairly prominently in Sunday's piece.)

If any of the eye-rolling and yawning White House staffers were Catholics, or Christians more generally -- as I expect many would claim to be -- it's hard to see how they'd square that contempt and indifference with their faith.  Funding for private community-based anti-poverty entities (faith-based and secular), especially through block grants to the states, broadly combines the preferential option for the poor and the principle of subsidiarity.  Someone who rolls his eyes at the idea, it seems to me, is likely operating on the principle that a libertarian friend of mine articulated:  life should be as tough as possible for the poor, to discourage them from staying poor.

Tom B.