Bishop Sedgwick Daniels, one of this city's most prominent black pastors, supported Democrats in past presidential elections, backing Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
This fall, however, the bishop's broad face appeared on Republican Party fliers in the battleground state of Wisconsin, endorsing President Bush as the candidate who "shares our views."
What changed?
After Bush's contested 2000 victory, Daniels felt the pull of a most powerful worldly force: a call from the White House. He conferred with top administration officials and had a visit in 2002 from the president himself. His church later received $1.5 million in federal funds through Bush's initiative to support faith-based social services.
Daniels' political conversion, and similar transformations by black pastors across the nation, form a little-known chapter in the playbook of Bush's 2004 reelection campaign — and may mark the beginning of a political realignment long sought by senior White House advisor Karl Rove and other GOP strategists.
Daniels says it was not the federal money that led him to endorse the Republican candidate this year, but rather the values of Bush and other party leaders who champion church ministries, religious education and moral clarity. It was evidence to many religious African Americans that the GOP could be an appealing home.
That's exactly the way many conservative Republican and evangelical leaders hope the faith-based program will work. [...]
[...] As Bush political advisor Dowd put it: "The minister is the No. 1 influencer in the African American community."
The administration's attention to faith-based programs in battleground states appeared to pay off.
In Florida, where record black turnout in Democratic precincts nearly put Gore in the White House in 2000, Bush's support among African Americans in November rose 6 percentage points to 13%, helping to increase the president's victory margin and avoid a repeat of the 2000 squeaker that inspired the recount.
In Wisconsin, the president drew 14% of the black vote this year, 3 points above his nationwide performance.
In all-important Ohio, Bush's vote tally among African Americans more than doubled his 2000 total, and he gained 7 percentage points to draw 16% of the black vote. If Bush had received the same proportion of black votes in Ohio as he did in 2000, the president's margin of victory would have narrowed from the actual 118,000 to about 25,000, according to an analysis by David Bositis at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a leading think tank on black issues. [...]
| Continue Peter Wallsten, Tom Hamburger and Nicholas Riccardi's registration-required Los Angeles Times article "Bush Rewarded By Black Pastor's Faith"
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