July 24, 2008 | Read Time: 6 minutes
As officials of some 400 rural nonprofit groups gathered last month at the National Rural Assembly’s annual meeting in Washington, they heard from two representatives of the men seeking to become the next president of the United States.
Speaking on behalf of Barack Obama, Tom Daschle, the former senator from South Dakota, confidently ticked off a list of “Barack believes” statements on issues that are of critical concern to rural nonprofit groups.
Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas spoke in support of John McCain. He attested to his colleague’s character and political bona fides but offered little about what the candidate’s platform had to say to rural nonprofit groups. He urged his listeners to help him persuade his candidate to pay attention to — and perhaps even support — policies that benefit rural communities and nonprofit groups.
That same kind of dichotomy can be seen in the Web sites where the candidates outline their policies. The Obama campaign’s Web site offers a big plan for national service as well as proposals to provide money and guidance to nonprofit groups devising solutions to social problems. Mr. Obama sometimes fails to be clear about how he will carry out his objectives, but he has made clear what he values.
Sen. McCain’s Web site, on the other hand, is devoid of policies that affect nonprofit organizations and he has been silent on most of the matters that affect nonprofit organizations.
While one candidate has a lot more to say about nonprofit groups than the other, what is most extraordinary about the 2008 campaign for the White House is that both candidates bring experience with the nonprofit world to the table. That amount of experience should be the basis for a solid presidential-campaign discussion about nonprofit issues. But the imbalance in the candidates’ campaign platforms suggests that that won’t happen, leaving critical issues such as nonprofit accountability and the relationship between government and charity out of the campaign debates.
While Mr. Obama’s Senate financial-disclosure statement includes no mention of current ties to nonprofit groups, Senator Obama got his first real exposure to the nonprofit world when he served as a community organizer in Chicago; he also did legal work for nonprofit groups after he graduated from law school and served on several foundation boards. His wife, Michelle Obama, founded the Chicago affiliate of Public Allies, a national community-service organization, and served as vice president of a nonprofit hospital.
Senator McCain’s last few disclosure filings are loaded with nonprofit board service — in recent years, he has served on the boards of the Foundation for Melanoma Research, Gallaudet University, the Hopi Mission School Foundation, the Intrepid Foundation, the Nixon Center, and the Translational Genomics Research Institute, as well as the advisory boards of the Institute on Religion and Public Policy; the Raúl Yzaguirre Policy Institute, at the University of Texas-Pan American; and Rebuilding Together, formerly Christmas in April, among others.
Cindy McCain, his wife, also has a substantial history of nonprofit experience. She founded and ran the American Voluntary Medical Team to bring medical personnel to countries affected by wars and disasters, and she has served on the boards of other groups that work overseas, such as CARE, Operation Smile, and Halo Trust USA, a group that seeks to eliminate land mines and other dangerous war debris.
Senator McCain seems genuinely interested in serving these groups to help them advance the causes they care about.
And he has been outspoken in the past about charity accountability issues. He expressed much anger (along with Sen. Byron Dorgan) at the Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing on the philanthropic shenanigans of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s Capital Athletic Foundation, concluding that the organization’s grants for arming West Bank settlers “didn’t pass the smell test” of legitimate charitable activity.
Senator McCain has also criticized dubious charities established by politicians like Tom DeLay and others, because of the way they solicited charitable donations from special-interest groups and lobbyists.
But he got caught up in a touchy situation after he founded his own charity — the Reform Institute — ostensibly dedicated to cleaning up campaign-finance practices. Ultimately, the senator had to disaffiliate himself from the organization’s messy financial practices.
It is puzzling that Mr. McCain has not said anything about the need for nonprofit groups to strengthen their ethics and accountability, given his role in the Abramoff investigation, his firsthand experience with the ethical questions surrounding the Reform Institute, and his track record of board involvement with legitimate nonprofit groups.
Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has offered audacious proposals to bolster the nonprofit world. The “Helping All Americans Serve Their Country” proposal would expand AmeriCorps from 75,000 to 250,000 slots (funneled into five new corps programs), double the Peace Corps to 16,000 volunteers, push for expanded opportunities to combine community service and education for middle- and high-school students in a new Classroom Corps, and create a college- tuition tax credit to students who provide at least 100 hours a year of community service.
This month Mr. Obama has garnered both acclaim and criticism by announcing his plan to continue and expand President Bush’s efforts to steer government aid to religious groups. Conservative critics denounced it as the candidate’s pandering to the evangelical vote, while others questioned whether some of his ideas, such as enlisting large nonprofit groups to “tutor” smaller ones, made sense.
But this is not about campaign politics; instead it shows Senator Obama’s return to his roots. In his Chicago community-organizing days, he worked for the Developing Communities Project, a Chicago group that has been affiliated with the Calumet Community Religious Conference, a church-based organizing effort. Among his mentors were Jesuits and ministers, including one of the founders of the Gamaliel Foundation, a Chicago group that encourages religious leaders to get involved in grass-roots activism.
Senator McCain has said little on the campaign trail about community service or the role of religious groups. In past statements Mr. McCain has shown little interest in connecting community service to governmental catalysts like AmeriCorps. And in a teleconference last month, Jay Hein, who heads the White House’s efforts to help religious groups, made a tortured reference to Mr. McCain’s position after lauding Mr. Obama’s proposals: “As I understand it, Senator McCain has also made reference to the [faith-based] initiative, suggesting that he, too, might be interested in keeping it.”
If in January we see a President Obama in the Oval Office, nonprofit groups and foundations can expect a substantive dialogue with White House officials. If it’s President McCain, we might have to call on Senator Brownback to turn the new president’s attention to the needs and potentials of the nonprofit world.
Rick Cohen is national correspondent for The Nonprofit Quarterly magazine.
