In a blatant attempt to court the vote of those most unlikely to support him, Senator John Kerry has hired the woman who had been Howard Dean’s “religious outreach coordinator” in Iowa.

Mara Vanderslice tells of her time with Dean:

“I was quickly dubbed the ‘church lady,’ ” Miss Vanderslice wrote in the May issue of Sojourners [a magazine described by the Washington Times as "a liberal evangelical magazine", whatever that means], “as I tried to convince senior staff that, although many people of faith supported Dean’s positions, his secular image would hurt him in the election.”
Miss Vanderslice was then recommended to the [Kerry] campaign by Maureen Shea, the Clinton administration’s liaison to religious groups from 1997 to 2001.

At first, Miss Vanderslice was given wide latitude to define Mr. Kerry’s positions on spiritual issues and to hire assistants who would reach out to Muslims and black churches, the Kerry campaign source said.

As you can probably guess, Vanderslice is rather left wing. Would you expect anything less from Senator Kerry?

Miss Vanderslice, 29, grew up Unitarian in Boulder, Colo., then attended Earlham College, a Quaker institution in Richmond, Ind.

She joined a college socialist group, majored in peace and global studies, and graduated in 1997. After interning for a year at Sojourners, a liberal evangelical magazine in the District, she joined the Jubilee USA Network, a D.C.-based group that campaigns for Third World debt relief.

What Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, found especially problematic was Miss Vanderslice’s presence at a violent December 2000 rally in Seattle against the International Monetary Fund and a similar protest in September 2002 in the District against the IMF and the World Bank.

In articles on the protests, the Boston Globe identified her as an organizer and the Denver Post quoted her plans to take part in civil disobedience in order to shut down the IMF meeting in the District.

“What you get here is a profile of a woman on the far left and whose commitment to Christian organizations is connected to the most left-wing groups in the United States,” Mr. Donohue said.

But now that some people are giving him flack for the blatant manipulation of religion by someone who is so out of touch with people who really believe the Bible means something, Kerry is ignoring his new director of religious outreach, and not allowing her to talk to the media. His other advisors are telling him not to talk about religion at all, because he will only get himself into trouble.

Obviously, the people in his campaign don’t understand true Christians who believe the Bible. It probably is wisest for them to give up on the religious angle entirely, because Kerry just isn’t able to pull it off convincingly. Bill Clinton was great at playing that sort of role. He didn’t fool anyone, but he was able play the part quite well.

But what really struck me was how the press even gets the fact that Kerry is surrounded by people who are hostile to religion in general and Christianity in specific. This quote from the article struck me:

But with Miss Vanderslice not being allowed near the press, “They have no one in their communications shop who is conversant in religion,” she [Amy Sullivan, described by the Times as "a specialist on religion and the Democratic Party"] said.

They have no one who is conversant in religion. The best they can do is a left wing, Unitarian, violently anti-globalist, socialist whose very presence in the campaign offends people who believe in Biblical standards. And there’s no one else at all. No wonder they don’t understand people of faith.