Fighting hunger or the poor? Political battle over SNAP resumes -- April 19, 2018 column

 By MARSHA MERCER

Long before President Donald Trump bestowed a lavish tax break on the rich and proposed “harvest baskets” for the poor, another president said:

“That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable.”

Name that president. Was it Democrat FDR, JFK or LBJ?

Guess again. Republican Richard Nixon sent Congress the optimistic message in May 1969 that “the most bounteous of nations” should expand food stamps as part of an array of approaches to beat hunger. The program grew dramatically in the 1970s.

Back then, fighting hunger – not the poor -- was a bipartisan cause.

Then, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan reaped political hay by demonizing “welfare queens.” In office, he slashed the social safety net, including food stamps.

When Republican Newt Gingrich ran for president, briefly, in 2012, he called President Barack Obama “the best food stamp president in American history.” It wasn’t a compliment.

More than 46 million people received food stamps that year. As the economy improved, food stamp rolls dropped. About 40 million participated in January 2018, the lowest level since 2010. 

But, to borrow a Reagan phrase, here we go again.

It’s an election year, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, as food stamps are officially called, is a political flash point.

Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee were in open revolt Wednesday over a bill by Chairman Mike Conaway, Republican of Texas, that cuts spending and imposes new work requirements for almost all SNAP participants.  

Conaway contended his bill provides participants “the hope of a job and a skill and a better future for themselves and their families.”   

But Democrats, while supporting current work requirements, condemned the new rules, which were formulated without their input.

“Let me be clear: This bill, as currently written, kicks people off the SNAP program,” said Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the committee’s top Democrat, who called it an “ideological attack” on SNAP. It would create “giant, untested bureaucracies at the state level” lacking the money needed for meaningful job training, he said.

About 2 million people — particularly in low-income working families with children — would receive less or lose benefits altogether, the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in an analysis. A few would receive higher benefits, due to changes in how earnings are counted, but the net effect would still be a significant cut overall.

At $70 billion a year, food stamps are about three-quarters of spending in the Farm Bill, which also pays for crop subsidies, farm credit and land conservation. The bill cuts food stamp spending by $17.1 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

The committee approved the bill on a party line vote, but its future is murky. Even if the full House approves it, the Senate Agriculture Committee plans to write a bipartisan bill. In the past, an alliance of rural and urban lawmakers with different priorities has pushed the Farm Bill through Congress.

It’s worth remembering that 43 percent of SNAP participants live in a household where someone works. Rules already require participants to meet work requirements unless exempt because of age, disability or another reason. Able-bodied adults without dependents – ABAWDs in government jargon -- 18 to 49 can receive benefits for three months but after that must work or be in training. 

The House bill requires all work-capable adults aged 18 to 59 who are not disabled or caring for a child under 6 to demonstrate every month they are working or in job-training 20 hours a week.

Critics see punitive and racial overtones in the bill.

“The images of `able-bodied’ men not working are of African American men,” Rep. David Scott, Democrat of Georgia, said at the hearing.

“I guarantee you, if all the people who were on food stamps were white, there wouldn’t be this,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The House bill is an embarrassment, as was the Trump administration’s plan to begin distributing non-perishable items in “harvest boxes” to replace some food stamp benefits. That plan was widely panned as unworkable and seems to have been scrapped.   

The House bill should meet a similar end. In this “most bounteous of nations,” the Senate should start over with a bill Democrats and Republicans can support.

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Super Tuesday voters could put brakes on Trump -- but will they? -- Feb. 25, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

When Southern Democrats dreamed up Super Tuesday in the 1980s, they hoped to reinvigorate the party in the South by giving it clout in choosing the party’s presidential nominee.

Or as then-Tennessee Democratic Chairman Dick Lodge memorably put it in 1986: “When your dog bites you four or five times, it’s time to get a new dog. We’ve been bitten and it’s time for the South to get a new dog.”

Two years earlier, conservative Southerners, long fed up with Democrats’ presidential picks, not only rejected Walter Mondale and helped re-elect Ronald Reagan but also voted for Republicans for Congress.

Even the new dog couldn’t bring those voters back. They’ve been voting Republican ever since.

Today officials in both parties worry about the down-ballot consequences if insurgents Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders actually become their parties’ nominees.

Both parties are pinning their hopes on Super Tuesday, March 1, when more delegates will be chosen than on any other day during the primary season. Voters in a dozen states -- including Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia -- will cast ballots.

Big question: Will Super Tuesday help choose a widely acceptable nominee – or prolong the agony for the party establishment?

In 2008, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama kept fighting after Super Tuesday’s 22 contests were inconclusive.

Today though, Clinton holds a commanding lead over Sanders in polls in Virginia and other Super Tuesday Southern states, where black voters dominate.

Among Republicans, Ted Cruz, who won the Iowa GOP caucuses, says Super Tuesday will be “the most important night of this campaign.” Rivals Marco Rubio and John Kasich also hope to break out and put the brakes on Trump.

Trump Fever, however, seems to be spreading. The billionaire businessman’s margin of victory widened from New Hampshire to South Carolina to Nevada. In Nevada, Trump won 46 percent of the vote, about the same as Rubio and Cruz combined.  Kasich and Ben Carson together didn’t reach 10 percent.

Super Tuesday was also more snooze than shock in 2012. President Barack Obama was running unopposed for re-election in most states, so all the action was on the Republican side.

Mitt Romney hoped to sweep Super Tuesday states and force his rivals from the GOP race. Romney captured 40 percent of the popular vote and about half the delegates – a performance seen as underwhelming and predictable, much like the candidate himself.

Georgia went for Newt Gingrich and Alabama and Tennessee supported Rick Santorum, who also won North Dakota and Oklahoma and came within a whisker of beating Romney in Ohio. Neither Gingrich nor Santorum was able to qualify for the ballot in Virginia, where Romney won.

“With No Knockout Punch, a Bruising Battle Plods On,” read a headline in The New York Times the day after Super Tuesday.

This time around, Trump -- endorsed by Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and son of the late televangelist – has surprised the establishment by winning support from white evangelical voters, who dominate the Southern GOP.

In Alabama and Tennessee, for example, more than 70 percent of GOP primary voters are white evangelical Christians, an analysis by Geoffrey Skelley of the University of Virginia Center for Politics found.

In Tennessee, record numbers of Republican voters have turned out for early primary voting, which could bode well for Trump, although that’s uncertain as there have been no recent polls. Cruz and Rubio are also courting evangelicals.

In Virginia, while about 40 percent of the Republican primary vote is evangelical, 58 percent of voters are college educated, says UVa’s Skelley who suggests Northern Virginia voters could blunt Trump, and Rubio could benefit. Trump led in a Christopher Newport University poll of likely Republican primary voters in Virginia in mid-February.

The richest delegate states on Super Tuesday are Texas and Georgia, where Trump is strong. He and Cruz were neck and neck in the latest polls, released Thursday, while earlier Cruz had led handily in his home state. Trump leads by double digits in Georgia and Alabama, according to the polls.

Trump appears to have momentum, and the South is poised to solidify him as the GOP frontrunner. How ironic if Super Tuesday, which was intended to give Southern conservatives a moderating influence on presidential choices, made Trump unstoppable.

If that happens, the parties may want to get a new dog.  

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Skimping on brain food -- April 5, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama says “the next great American project” will be mapping human brain activity.

The budget he will send Congress Wednesday calls for $110 million for his brain initiative in fiscal 2014, which begins Oct. 1.

Even Newt Gingrich and Eric Cantor support brain research. Former Republican House Speaker Gingrich said Obama “deserved credit for taking an important step in the right direction.”  And House Majority Leader Cantor said in a statement it’s “exactly the type of research we should be funding…it’s great science.”

Before we go all gooey about gridlock thawing in Washington, a new space race or our 21^st Century Camelot, let’s take a deep breath. The president proposes, Congress disposes. And $110 million -- bold?

Don’t get me wrong. You’d have to be living in a cave not to support the effort to unlock the mysteries of the brain. We need this research, and we need it now. But it’s hardly a done deal. There’s plenty of time for Republican mischief making. And about that federal effort of $110 million a year – that doesn’t say bold or audacious.  It says modest. Piddling.

I get the rationale for starting small. Maybe it’s the best the president can hope for in the Honey- I-Shrank-Uncle-Sam era. But in modern America, $110 million is small potatoes.

It’s Justin Bieber’s net worth. He’s 19.

It’s the listing price of a penthouse apartment in New York City last year. OK, the apartment was near Carnegie Hall, but still.

It’s even just three-tenths of 1 percent of the National Institutes of Health’s annual budget, according to Francis Collins, the director.  

He said in a live chat via Twitter that NIH is in a “pickle” after budget cuts over 10 years that lopped 20 percent of purchasing power for research. Sequestration is draining $1.5 billion from NIH this year, he said.

So don’t let cold-eyed budget hawks tell you $110 million is a large sum. The Human Genome Project got about $300 million a year from Uncle Sam. Total federal investment was $3.8 billion. The project to map the human genome took 13 years.

Obama likes to tell audiences that every dollar spent on the genome project generated $140 in economic output.  Not bad.

Republican Cantor suggested “reprioritizing the $250 million we currently spend on political and social science research” for the brain initiative. It almost sounded as if Cantor was doubling the president’s bid on brain research. Wouldn’t that be fun? More likely, Cantor was trying to show he’s for the brain, conservatively speaking.

Obama envisions his initiative as “giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be – will be – transformative.”

After a decade of war, no politician will, or should, ever say we’re doing all we can to help our wounded warriors with traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder. No one can tell families struggling to help loved ones that we should wait to look for ways to treat, cure or even prevent Alzheimer’s, autism, epilepsy, Parkinson’s and strokes.

And yet, such practical applications of the BRAIN project -- Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies – are far off. Obama didn’t mention a timeline or even a definite goal.

Three federal agencies will contribute money to the research in the year that begins Oct. 1: National Institutes of Health, $40 million;   Defense Advanced Research Projects, $50 million; and the National Science Foundation, $20 million.

Some say this isn’t the right time begin a new project because of budget woes, but Collins says research has progressed to the point where putting it on hold is wrong.

The federal government will work with four foundations on brain research. The Allen Institute for Brain Science has agreed to spend $60 million annually on projects related to the initiative; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, $30 million annually; the Kavli Foundation, $4 million a year over 10 years; and  Salk Institute for Biological Studies, $28 million.

It’s a good start, but it’s not enough.

“I wish we could go faster,” Collins said on the live Twitter chat. “Maybe we’ll be able to ramp it up.”

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Obama's Clinton gamble -- Aug. 2, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

As his adoring fans cheer, the country’s most beloved Democrat strides onstage at the Democratic National Convention and delivers a prime-time speech that makes all the difference come Election Day.


Nah, I’m not imagining Barack Obama’s big night in Charlotte.

It’s Bill Clinton I see. Clinton is more popular and potentially more powerful in motivating Democrats this fall, something Obama conceded when he tapped Clinton for the high-profile role of formally nominating Obama for a second term.

Two in three Americans now have a favorable opinion of Bill Clinton, about the same as at his first presidential inauguration in 1993. Even the haters have mellowed. Only 28 percent of people have an unfavorable opinion of Clinton, an all-time low.

Obama, who desperately needs goodwill, had a respectable 54 percent favorable rating in the same Gallup poll, released July 30.

Bill Clinton has triumphed. A dozen years after Al Gore treated him like a bad smell throughout the 2000 campaign, Clinton is the go-to guy for Obama. The Clintons must love that. Hillary Clinton – whose favorable rating is the same 66 percent as her husband’s – will be a no-show at the Democratic convention. As secretary of state, she is not in campaign mode. Not this year.

If anyone can breathe life into flagging Democrats, Bill Clinton can. And yet, his words can and will be held against Obama. Four years ago Clinton compared voting for Obama to a roll of the dice, and he recently said Romney had a “sterling” business career and was qualified to be president.

Even if Clinton curbs his independent streak and speaks persuasively for Obama, his presence inevitably invites comparisons. Newt Gingrich, hardly an impartial judge, predicted Clinton’s convention speech would “shrink” Obama.

Putting Clinton front and center reminds voters that he worked successfully with a Republican Congress. The rejoinder of course is that Clinton did not have a Senate majority leader who said from Day One that holding the president to one term was his top priority. Would Clinton have found a way to work around that obstacle? No one knows.

A few weeks before Clinton was nominated for a second presidential term. he signed into law bipartisan welfare reform, a minimum wage increase and health insurance portability. Clinton didn’t get everything he wanted, but he was a pragmatist. He infuriated liberals, but at the convention and into the fall he could point to fresh accomplishments on behalf of the middle class.

At the August 1996 signing ceremony for the welfare reform law, Clinton said welfare would no longer be a political issue and politicians would not be able to attack each other or the poor. At the time, many thought that wishful thinking. But he was right.

Welfare stayed largely off the table for many years. A disturbing report by the General Accountability Office in 2005 riled Democrats and Republicans with its finding that some states were counting toward the work requirements such activities as getting a massage and writing in a journal.

Overall, welfare rolls declined, though, until the recession hit and the ranks of children living in poverty started to rise. And then last month the Obama administration sparked a Republican rebellion by announcing more flexibility for states in how they run their welfare programs. The administration said it would grant waivers to allow states to experiment with their welfare-to-work programs without filing paperwork.

Even though more than two dozen Republican governors had signed a letter asking for more flexibility, Republican leaders reacted angrily. They accused Obama of gutting the law’s work requirements and, in effect, killing welfare reform. House Speaker John Boehner called the change a “partisan disgrace.” Romney said it was “completely misdirected.”

Yes, these same Republicans usually want states to have more power to create programs that meet their residents’ needs – not less. And no state has to apply for a waiver. It’s voluntary.

An official in the federal agency that administers welfare said, “Many states report that their caseworkers are spending more time complying with federal documentation requirements that helping parents find jobs.” The White House press secretary called the complaints “hypocritical.”

Ah, but it’s campaign season. Politics overrides everything.

By putting Clinton onstage, Obama can remind voters that a Democratic president once got things done and gamble that they will think he can do the same. That’s Obama’s big gamble.

©2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Family values, fundraising, fairness -- and Obama's stance on same-sex marriage -- May 10, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

To those who were shocked, shocked to hear that campaign politics might have figured into President Barack Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, I have bad news. It was ever thus.

Obama fired off a fundraising email the day after he said he personally supports same-sex marriage. Unseemly, yes, but hardly surprising. Political strategizing has been at the heart of the war over marriage equality since the Defense of Marriage Act was a glimmer in Bob Dole’s eye 16 years ago.

As President Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996, Dole, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, co-sponsored the Senate bill that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

Dole wanted to stir the “family values” pot, but Clinton grabbed the spoon.

As Dole shepherded the bill banning same-sex marriage through Congress, with the help of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the White House announced that yes, indeed, Clinton would sign it. And in September he did so, ignoring the outrage of gay supporters. The re-election campaign soon ran ads on Christian radio stations, lauding the president for fighting for “our values.”

Clinton sanded the edges off what Dole had hoped would be a wedge issue in that campaign. But the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, lives as the law of the land. Obama disavowed DOMA and has refused to defend it in court – but the law still blocks thousands of lawfully wedded same-sex couples from receiving benefits available to heterosexual couples. We’ve yet to hear how Obama proposes to change that.

In 1996, no state had legalized same-sex marriage. Today, six states and the District of Columbia permit it, but under DOMA no state must recognize same-sex marriages that are performed in another state.

Section 3 of the law specifies that for federal purposes ``the word `marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife.”

The law effectively cuts out same-sex married couples from more than 1,100 federal benefits, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.

Married same-sex couples cannot file joint tax returns, take unpaid family leave, receive surviving spouse benefits under Social Security or receive family health and pension benefits as federal civilian employees.

Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC News Wednesday that, “For me, personally, it is important…to go ahead and affirm that I think that same-sex couples should be able to get married.” But he dodged questions about what he will actually do, saying the issue should be left to the states.

A day earlier, North Carolina became the 30th state to ban same-sex marriage, reinforcing current law with a constitutional amendment.

It’s difficult to imagine how Obama can stick to the stance that his views are merely personal when he says fairness and justice are at stake. He stood for fairness when he backed repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the policy that prevented gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the military.

The main rationale for not defending DOMA in the courts was Obama’s determination that the law was unconstitutional, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. wrote House Speaker John A. Boehner in February 2011. Nevertheless, law is law, and the president ordered his attorney general to continue enforcing it.

House Republicans hired a lawyer to defend the law in the courts.

The Supreme Court likely will decide the issues at some point. For now, Obama has a campaign to run and pay for. One in six of his top bundlers, who have brought in $500,000 or more, have publicly identified themselves as gay, The Washington Post reported.

Obama is trying to walk a line between voters with strong feelings. He stressed in the ABC interview that he deeply respects pastors and others who believe in traditional marriage, and he indicated that same-sex marriage isn’t a current priority.

“I’m not gonna be spending most of my time talking about this, because, frankly, my job as president right now, my biggest priority, is to make sure that we’re growing the economy, that we’re putting people back to work, that we’re managing the draw-down in Afghanistan effectively,” he said.

But he’s not shy about using the issue to bring in campaign cash. For now, Obama’s strategy is to describe himself as a practicing Christian who believes in the Golden Rule.

“Treat others the way you’d want to be treated,” he said before boarding Air Force One for a trip to the West Coast for fundraisers, where his support of same-sex marriage could boost his haul.

©2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

'Socialist' Obama? Truth is a casualty -- Jan. 19, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Over the holidays, one of my dearest Republican relatives said, “Well, it’s too bad Obama turned out to be such a socialist.”

Then, she added in a tone between sadness and sarcasm, “I’m sure most people wouldn’t have voted for him if they’d known that.”

What? I paused to process her calm declaration and realized that what I hear -- and discount -- as political potshots in a presidential campaign have become in the ears of some voters reliable truth.

That surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. The old saying that “the first casualty of war is truth” also applies to political warfare.

The barrage against President Barack Obama started before he took office and has continued nonstop. Obama’s decision largely to ignore the charges just allows them to fester.

Newt Gingrich’s latest attacks on Obama as “the greatest food-stamp president in American history” are classic. Gingrich portrays Obama as socialist in chief, and Obama refuses to knock down the notion that he favors encouraging dependency on the state.

No wonder that 10 months before the election, half the voters surveyed in the latest New York Times and CBS News poll said Obama doesn’t have the same priorities for the country that they do.

The economy remains the country’s No. 1 issue, and 60 percent think Obama has done nothing to improve it. Most Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.

And, confirming my holiday conversation, the poll also found that better than one in four voters -- 26 percent -- believe Obama’s policies are socialist. Twenty-two percent say his policies are liberal and 28 percent moderate.

If you’ve listened to the Republican presidential contenders sniping at each other, you know it’s now a supreme knock to call someone running for president a moderate.

Despite all this, polls consistently find that Obama would beat all the Republican presidential hopefuls -- except one. He ties with Mitt Romney, who’s most likely to be his rival in November.

And here’s where it gets really interesting. Obama ties with Romney even though most voters say they lack a clear idea about what Obama wants to accomplish in a second term.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Obama will outline his policy goals for the coming year, but implicit will be his plans for a second term. Hoping to rekindle the sparks of 2008, he’ll appeal to the middle class and ally himself with the 99 percent.

It’s a tough sell for a president who seems more professorial than populist. But the best thing Obama has going for him is the contrast with Romney, whose comments this week that he probably paid a 15 personal tax rate set him even farther apart from ordinary people than Obama.

For whatever reason, Obama has been reluctant to mention poverty, even as the ranks of the poor expand. He could use his primetime speech to explain why everyone benefits from a strong safety net. He could tell about policy changes in the George W. Bush presidency that led to increases in the food stamp rolls and trace how the economic slump intensified need. He could call on the Republicans to help, rather than demonize, the poor.

In 2008, voters were willing to buy the promise of hope and change. When Caroline Kennedy endorsed Obama in an op-ed in the Times on Jan. 27, 2008, she wrote:

“I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.”

That’s still a good job description for president in 2012.

Ms. Kennedy also wrote that Obama would inspire in people “a sense of possibility” that they have the power to shape their own future. It hasn’t worked out that way. Yet.

To shape his own future, Obama needs to inspire a new sense of individual possibility, not imply dependency that his enemies will call socialism.

© 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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On politics, religion and the Jefferson Bible -- Dec. 21, 2011 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Earlier this year, when presidential candidates claimed that God had “called” them to run for the White House, some people were offended. I couldn’t help thinking that God has a sense of humor.

But I wondered how people would react if the president – any president -- were sitting up nights in the White House, cutting out parts of the Bible he or she didn’t like. Many would find such handiwork a sacrilege and an outrage. I’d figure Thomas Jefferson had reached out for a chat.

Barack Obama is not busily reconstructing the New Testament, as far as we know. But in the White House in 1804 Jefferson started editing the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with a pen knife or similar sharp instrument and carefully began pasting passages of Christ’s teachings by topic on paper.

Decades later, when he was 77 and living at Monticello, Jefferson produced an edited text of the Gospels. He created an 86-page volume of the life of Christ, parables and teachings by cutting and pasting passages from the New Testament in Greek, Latin, French and English. Jefferson left out the miracles and supernatural events, including the annunciation, angels, virgin birth and the Resurrection.

He titled his version “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” had it bound in red leather and read it regularly.

The first volume Jefferson made has been lost, but the Smithsonian Institution bought the Jefferson Bible in 1895. It deteriorated over years, but after a year of restoration is on display at the National Museum of American History.

Like most people, I’d heard about the Jefferson Bible, but seeing the book that Jefferson himself made scrapbook style was a highlight of my museum experiences this year.

The exhibit, open through May 28, does what a visit to a museum should: It makes you think.

In our age, a presidential candidate’s ability to speak a foreign language is fodder for ridicule -- check out YouTube. Our politicians too often feel obliged to wear their faith on their sleeve.

Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain both claimed that God called them to run for president. Anita Perry, wife of Rick, said God spoke to her about a presidential bid, but her husband needed to see a “burning bush,” a reference to God’s first appearance to Moses.

Mitt Romney tells stories about his year spreading Mormonism in France. Newt Gingrich talks about converting to Catholicism after marrying his third wife, Callista, a Catholic. Gingrich admits to past extramarital affairs but says he has repented to God.

Gingrich even sent a letter to the head of a major evangelical group in Iowa recently, pledging “to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others.”

All this likely would seem strange to Jefferson, who held his faith close. Lambasted as a “howling atheist” during the brutal presidential campaign of 1800, Jefferson later described himself in a letter as “a real Christian – that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus Christ.”

Scholars say Jefferson, like George Washington, was a deist who believed that a supreme being created the world and then stepped back. Jefferson called the Bible “the best book in the world” but believed its zealous authors had embellished the story of Jesus Christ.

Jefferson described his Bible project in a letter to John Adams as “abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its luster from the dross of his biographers, and as separate from that as the diamond from the dung hill.”

The Smithsonian has published a facsimile edition of the Jefferson Bible, and versions are available from other publishers. The Jefferson Bible is available online at the Monticello site.

Jefferson’s views on religion were complex and he was reluctant to express them, says Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough in Smithsonian magazine. Clough quotes Jefferson: “I not only write nothing on religion,” he told a friend, “but rarely permit myself to speak on it.”

Smart man, that Jefferson.


© 2011 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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