Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Chapter 13: Second Time Around
George W. Bush’s campaign staff runs by me the speech he plans to give when he formally kicks off his run for president on July 23, 1999, at a Methodist church in Indianapolis. He embraces our task force’s recommendations, saying, “Government can spend money, but it can’t put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. This is done by churches and synagogues and mosques and charities that warm the cold of life.”
In Indianapolis, church choirs rev up the multiethnic crowd. Bush hugs several church leaders and proposes that “resources should be devolved, not just to states, but to charities and neighborhood healers.” He stipulates that “we will never ask an organization to compromise its core values and spiritual mission to get the help it needs.”
Bush emphasizes the importance of religious groups being religious. They should not have to become government look-alikes to gain access to resources. He makes a promise: “We will provide for charity tax credits. . . . Individuals will choose who conducts this war on poverty—and their support won’t be filtered through layers of government officials.”
My volunteer membership on Team Bush means recusing myself from editing any World stories on the GOP presidential contest, but I’m free to talk to the reporters from the East and West Coasts who come to Austin puzzled about Bush. I’m a faculty fellow at a UT dorm, which gives me free dining hall privileges. Much to the dismay of the journalists who call, we eat in the dining hall. Over pizza or burgers, I tell them my role is highly informal and my contact with Bush rare. At least one tells me later he assumes I’m being coy: anyone who downplays his access must have huge access.
The more I truthfully downplay my role, the more my supposed status rises, as press accounts move from the accurate “informal Bush advisor” to “the revered intellectual guru of Governor Bush.” The Washington Post elevates me from “Bush advisor” to “Bush counselor” to “a close policy adviser to George W. Bush.” One German publication dubs me his “ear-whisperer.” The Moscow Times makes me Bush’s “closest domestic adviser” and “soulmate.”
In addition to interviews, I also play tour guide for print and broadcast reporters eager to see compassionate conservatism in action. I point them to homeless shelters and programs for addicts and ex-cons. Reporters visit my church, interview our pastor, and set up elaborate recording sessions in my living room. A New York Times reporter writes, “When I ask one of Bush’s top aides to explain what a compassionate conservative administration might look like, he says simply, ‘Talk to Marvin.’”
As the campaign heats up, it becomes increasingly clear to both me and Bush staffers that I’m not ideally suited to the role of designated talker. I like to think it’s my unwillingness to be put in a box, but maybe I’m just a loose cannon. In 1999, after praising the work of nineteenth-century women who
headed charitable enterprises, I say their twentieth-century entry into the corporate workforce hurts American society because it takes them out of volunteer work. Ouch. A book cleverly titled Bushwomen says, “Olasky is not a fan of highachieving women.”
I justify my lack of discipline by saying I don’t work for the campaign but make another unforced error in February 2000 by writing a column that plays with Tom Wolfe’s fanciful novel A Man in Full. Wolfe has his protagonist, in Atlanta, face a crisis and come to belief not in Christ (as many Georgians do) but in Zeus. I then call the 2000 GOP presidential sweepstakes a contest between Bush’s emphasis on charity and love and John McCain’s
stress on the classical virtues of honor and duty: Christianity versus “the religion of Zeus.”
My column in the Austin American Statesman goes on to criticize three New York–based, McCain-fan journalists who are not doing hard reporting about the candidate’s acceptance of cash from lobbyists. I say McCain is “as erratic as the Zeus of mythology, with a history of throwing thunderbolts in all directions” and “leading reporters are proselytes in the religion of Zeus instead of tough reporters.”
Ouch again. The statement is not unreasonable but it is unseasonable in the midst of a hard campaign. Worse, to some McCain supporters Zeus almost rhymes with Jews, which the three columnists I criticize are. Obviously, they say, I’m making an antisemitic dog whistle. I call one of my critics and say, truthfully, that while knowing one of the columnists is Jewish, I live in Texas and didn’t know that about the other two. He’s a New Yorker and replies, “How could you not know?”
Crazy, but political crudity did not begin in 2016, and political wisdom means knowing that anything you say or write can be used against you. As some journalists defecate concrete, I step in it. In June a senior Bush aide and I travel to London to discuss with members of the Conservative Party whether
compassionate conservatism will work in a British context. The aide, with incredible discipline, turns almost any question back to a prepared talking point. When a reporter asks me an interesting question, though, I often stroke my beard, clear my throat, and give a speculative answer.
British reporters say I’m one of those disreputable American televangelists. The Observer opines, “On the endless plains of Indiana [Bush] repeated the phrase ‘compassionate conservatism’ 15 times. Bush had borrowed it from a man [who’s] got a beard. He’s called Marvin. What more need be said?” Something more, it turns out. As “spiritual overseer of George Bush’s Texas”—that will go great on business cards—I am a “born-again Christian who watched Bush from afar, on television, with a glow of satisfaction and a job in the White House awaiting him.”
When a 60 Minutes story slams me on the eve of the Republican convention, Team Bush sees me as more trouble than I’m worth to the campaign. I can’t dispute that judgment. The whole experience makes me grateful to be out of Washington, but a little wistful as well: it’s fun to see delegates at
the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia wearing “I’m a compassionate conservative” buttons.
I still need to fulfill speaking commitments. The most memorable is an October 2000 lecture at Washington University in St. Louis. Ten young women walk in wearing lime green T-shirts that proclaim in black letters, “I’m a compassionate conservative because . . .” Hurrah, I finally have groupies. Not
quite: my speech begins, and they stand up, turning their backs to show the continuation of their message: “. . . because I’m racist, sexist” and so forth. They do sit down after several minutes and politely listen to the rest of my yakking. Several realize they’ve been misinformed, and they give me an extra T-shirt afterward.
On election night, my family and I head to a plaza near the Texas capitol. Television crews have set up a tall grandstand where they conduct interviews. The illuminated red granite capitol building provides the backdrop. Big screens show the network television feeds. At the top of the grandstand at 9 p.m. a BBC interviewer, assuming Al Gore has won, asks me with a sneer, “Looking at the returns, would you agree that compassionate conservatism hasn’t much of a future?” A roar from the Bush crowd drowns out my answer. Florida, earlier declared a Gore conquest, is once again in play—and maybe compassionate conservatism is still alive.
Five weeks after the 2000 election, the US Supreme Court confirms the election of George W. Bush. On December 13, Bush gives his first speech as president-elect: “Together we will address some of society’s deepest problems one person at a time, by encouraging and empowering the good hearts
and good works of the American people. This is the essence of compassionate conservatism.”
Eight days later, Bush meets at Austin’s First Baptist Church with thirty “national faith-based leaders” and me, a journalist-historian. Sitting on plastic chairs arranged in a circle, we each have thirty seconds to express directly to the president-elect how we hope the administration will empower good hearts—and maybe hire us. My turn: I say I’ll continue to edit a politically independent magazine and “we’ll zing you at times.” Bush seems momentarily surprised but then laughs and says, “Join the club.”
He closes the short meeting with a wry comment: “I hope that a year from now no one is going to be able to say that this was all just smoke and mirrors.” But that’s what one of the leading evangelicals of that era, Prison Fellowship head Chuck Colson, thinks is likely.
With Bush not yet in the White House, Colson writes me a long letter that describes how leaders in Philadelphia are kicking Prison Fellowship off the committee for a Philadelphia project designed to bring together groups devoted to fighting crime, drugs, and other negative aspects of gang life. The reason: other members are uncomfortable with Colson’s talk about “evangelizing the streets of Philadelphia, bringing people to Christ.”
In his letter, Colson describes his conversation with an “eminent social scientist” regarding a young man who has become a Christian and is now “on the streets preaching and reading the Bible to members of gangs.” Colson sees this “transformed life” as an example of success, but the academic disagrees. The results need to be peer-reviewed, he says.
Colson is prescient. I expect President-Elect Bush to select former Indianapolis mayor Steve Goldsmith, a decentralizer, to head up the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Instead, Bush names John DiIulio, the same eminent sociologist who upset Colson. DiIulio is a Catholic and Democrat, so he checks some boxes politically, but back in Austin I share Colson’s concern. My outsider status guarantees that I have no input.
