The real Dick DeVos please stand up, please stand up

BRIAN DICKERSON: Republican strategists cringe as the real DeVos stands up BRIAN DICKERSON: Republican strategists cringe as the real DeVos stands up BY BRIAN DICKERSONFREE PRESS COLUMNIST September 22, 2006 Mayday! Mayday! All hands on deck! Full astern! OK -- so maybe Dick DeVos' handlers didn't really shout those things Wednesday when their candidate told the Associated Press he'd like to see more public schools make a religious doctrine known as intelligent design a part of their science curricula. But the urgency with which top GOP strategists moved to limit the fallout from DeVos' public embrace of creationism was striking in a campaign that has been mostly smooth sailing. Since last February, Michigan voters have been steeped in a $13-million TV campaign designed to portray DeVos as a sophisticated businessman with little time for the social agenda that animates his party's conservative Christian wing. Gov. Jennifer Granholm finally joined the broadcast scrum in August, but even Democratic strategists concede privately that DeVos' TV campaign has been more polished. DeVos himself has been equally disciplined, eschewing the evangelical causes that have preoccupied him as a private citizen to hammer away at the jobs issue every pollster says is the electorate's paramount concern. Granholm's ads paint DeVos as an outsourcer of jobs and exploiter of corporate tax breaks. But even those attacks reinforce Republican efforts to frame DeVos as a businessman more interested in economic development than in abortion or school prayer. Then, Wednesday afternoon, the DeVos campaign found itself uncharacteristically off-message. The culprit was not a new Democratic attack ad, but the Republican candidate himself. In a phone interview with Kathy Barks Hoffman, veteran chief of AP's Lansing bureau, DeVos opined that Michigan's science curriculum should include a discussion of intelligent design, which posits that the biological theory of natural selection fails to account for the complexity of living organisms. "I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory," DeVos said. "That theory and others that would be considered credible would expose our students to more ideas." A grass-roots campaign to advance intelligent design as a scientific alternative to the Darwinian theory of natural selection ran aground in the courts last year when a federal trial judge appointed by President George W. Bush concluded that intelligent design was "creationism relabeled" and barred a Pennsylvania school board from making it part of the science curriculum. Asked Wednesday whether he supported proposed guidelines that would allow school boards to mandate the teaching of intelligent design as part of their districts' science curriculum, DeVos replied that he did. The AP story broke on freep.com and other newspaper Web sites around lunchtime. By midafternoon, DeVos campaign manager Greg McNeilly and spokesman John Truscott were phoning reporters and editors around the state, challenging headlines that described DeVos as a proponent of intelligent design and insisting that his comments had merely reiterated his long-standing support for control of public school curricula. Voters who e-mailed the campaign to inquire about the interview received a reply informing them that news reports had "misrepresented" DeVos' views and enlisting voters' help in quashing "this untruthful rumor." For the record, Hoffman neither misrepresented nor embellished DeVos' comments. Her story was a faithful account of her taped interview. But voters needn't belabor what DeVos said (or meant to say) about intelligent design; they need only review his generous support for conservative Christian groups that have been working tirelessly to inject religion into the public school curriculum. To find out what most candidates are about, you need only look at who's bankrolling them and why. But in DeVos' case, it's at least as instructive to look at whom the candidate himself has bankrolled over the years. DeVos' status as one of the Republican National Committee's preeminent financiers is well known; without his patronage, our current president might be just another name on the lecture circuit. But what DeVos and his wife, Betsy, have given to politicians pales beside their generosity to conservative religious organizations working to outlaw abortion, prohibit gay marriage and adoption and promote school prayer, religious displays in government buildings and the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. Since 2002, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation gave at least $5,000 to the Thomas More Law Center, which unsuccessfully defended the Dover, Pa., school board in last year's federal court showdown and has threatened to sue on behalf of two Michigan science teachers who want to teach intelligent design. Tax records detailing the foundation's most recent donations weren't available Thursday. But the contributions documented in its 2002 tax return are among hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to similar groups ranging from the Michigan Family Forum and Right to Life of Michigan to the Lansing-based Foundation for Traditional Values, which sponsors what it calls the state's "premier Biblical worldview and leadership training program." All this generosity presumably betokens a more-than-casual interest in advancing the conservative Christian agenda espoused by these organizations. So you can hardly blame DeVos for putting his mouth where his money is -- even if the political strategists around him would rather he kept it shut. I'll be the first one to admit Granholm isn't prefect and the things she manage to get done with this corrupt brought and paid for Republican control state house is bar none amazing. But we have a choice here we can still progress with Granholm and put Michigan back on her feet or we're going to regress with DeVos, who's going to bend over backwards for the special interest and the richest people that lived in the states at the expense of average person in Michigan. On top screwing the poor he's going to allow his friends of the loon wing of the Republican party ram down their world view down our throats.