The Democratic National Committee has hired its first religious outreach director and its “Faith in Action” team now counts seven staff members, including those directing Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim outreach according to The New York Times. Leah Daughtery heads up this effort to assist candidates to reach out to religious voters and she has prompted the party to convene a 60-person faith advisory board and to train its members to combat the religious right on television.
Ever since he cited the Book of Job as his favorite part of the New Testament (it is actually in the Old Testament) and explained during his 2004 presidential campaign that he had left his church over a bike-path dispute, Howard Dean has been seen by many religious Americans as the nation’s secularist in chief.
That is why Mr. Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman, still gets surprised looks when he points out that his chief of staff is a Pentecostal minister.
Indeed, the raucous three-and-a-half-hour service that the chief of staff, Leah Daughtry, 44, presided over last Sunday from the pulpit of the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn seemed a world away not just from Mr. Dean, but also from the ways of official Washington.
Donning the yellow and white garments of that church’s clergy, Ms. Daughtry led a 25-member choir through the foot-stomping gospel number “I Can Go to God in Prayer.” She laid hands on parishioners and implored them to clear the way for Jesus.
“When I’m there in the pulpit, it really isn’t me,” the typically mild-mannered Ms. Daughtry said in an interview. “Sometimes I pray, ‘Decrease me and increase you, Lord.’”
Her duties at the Democratic National Committee are even more behind-the-scenes, with Ms. Daughtry preferring to stay out of the news. But for much of the last three years, she has worked to bridge the gap between the Brooklyn church in which she was raised — its pastor is her father, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry — and her Washington day job, becoming the quiet architect behind the committee’s religious outreach program.
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