Obama Announcing Support for Funding Faith-Based Programs in Zanesville Today

UPDATE: Jill is [attempting to] live blog the speech, and links to an article in Politico with details on Obama's plans - more after the break.

This has the potential for being a significant day for Barack Obama's campaign. Today in Zanesville he is announcing his support for expanding federal funding of religious organizations that provide social services - a broadening of the Bush administration's "Faith-Based and Community Initiatives" program that drew fire from civil libertarians and had to be implemented through executive orders rather than legislation due to opposition in Congress.

The Obama campaign has sent out a message from John DiIulio, who was the director of Bush's program in 2001, saying that "empirical evidence continues to show that local faith-based organizations can make a measurable civic difference" and that Obama's plan "reminds me of much that was best in both then Vice President Al Gore's and then Texas Governor George W. Bush's respective first speeches on the subject in 1999."

David Kuo, who ran the Bush administration's program in 2003 and later criticized Bush's support for it as insincere, told the AP that this could be a "Sistah Souljah" moment for Obama, meaning that Obama is staking out a position contrary to the general tendency of his base and thus showing himself to be politically courageous and an independent thinker.

Obama is qualifying his support by saying that the faith-based organizations should not be able to impose religious limitations on the recipients of the social services provided, and an Obama aide has further indicated that he thinks religious limitations on the hiring of employees should be confined to activities of the organizations that don't receive federal funding. Nevertheless, Obama's position is likely to be seen by many in his progressive base as pandering to religious voters, and as continuing a dangerous erosion of the separation of church and state.

The speech today comes in southeast Ohio subsequent to a tour of the facility of a religious charity. It follows yesterday's major speech on patriotism, and fits into an overall effort to define Obama in terms acceptable to a broad cross-section of Americans (and to undermine the false rumors about his religion and values being spread on the internet). It is consistent with his overall campaign message of overcoming partisan divisions and uniting the country, and ties into his personal support for the wide-ranging social programs run by his own church in Chicago.

DETAILS FROM POLITICO:

The Obama campaign released plans saying his new President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, working within the White House, “will work to engage faith-based organizations and help them abide by the principles that federal funds cannot be used to proselytize, that they should not discriminate in providing their services, and they should be held to the same standards of accountability as other federal grant recipients.”

The campaign listed four goals:

—Train the trainers to enable local faith-based organizations to learn best practices, grant-making procedures and service delivery so that they can better apply for and use federal dollars.

—Partner with state and local offices so that federal efforts build on successes made at the state and local level.

—Hold recipients responsible by conducting rigorous performance evaluation, researching what works well and disseminating best practices.

—Close the summer learning gap by focusing faith-based and community-based efforts on summer learning programs for 1 million children.