I suppose this is a good thing, but I just can't help wondering how genuine one's faith is if you have to hire people to advise you on how to impress others with it:
Hillary Clinton has hired an "evangelical consultant" to help woo Christian conservatives in her likely 2008 presidential campaign.
The move comes after a similar political operative successfully aided Democratic candidates in several states in the midterm elections.
More than one-quarter of the nation's voters identify themselves as evangelical - a voter bloc that has long been courted by Republicans.
Clinton's new hire is Burns Strider, an evangelical Christian who directs religious outreach for House Democrats and is the lead staffer for the Democrats' Faith Working Group, headed by incoming Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina.
Politics is all about image, of course, and the job of these consultants is to create an image of religiosity. Perhaps there is substance behind the image, perhaps not, but it seems phony, even Machiavellian, to have to hire someone to tell you how to express your faith in ways that will seem convincing to voters.
I doubt that neither Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan nor George Bush, three of the most genuinely religious presidents of the last thirty five years, felt the need to employ someone to do the job of burnishing their faith in the public eye.
