Posted on 05/22/2005 10:40:59 AM PDT by southernnorthcarolina
WASHINGTON - Claude Allen recalls the joy and pain of telling his mother about his decision to work for an N.C. congressional candidate.
"I said he was a Republican, and she was most upset," Allen said. "She said, `Oh, please don't do that, you'll ruin your life.' "
Nearly a quarter-century later, Allen is President Bush's top domestic policy adviser, one of the administration's most senior African American members, and a protege of former Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., the conservative who fiercely opposed affirmative action and a federal holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Allen's political path from a Philadelphia row house to Tobacco Road to a second-floor West Wing office was a long, and sometimes controversial one that few African Americans have traveled.
Republican Party officials and Christian conservatives regard Allen as a star on the rise, a values-conscious bureaucrat who helped reform Virginia's welfare system and championed sexual-abstinence programs at both state and federal levels.
"He's done a real good job, a very able man," said former Virginia Republican Gov. James Gilmore, who hired Allen when Gilmore was the state's attorney general. "He knows how to manage, he has a very good policy compass."
But Allen's critics, especially within the African American community, see a Helms disciple, a conservative ideologue who, as Virginia's health and human resources director, prevented the use of Medicaid funds for an abortion for an impoverished incest victim.
"I don't think his beliefs and the beliefs of the NAACP and black people in general are harmonious," said King Salim Khalfani, the Virginia NAACP's executive director, who clashed with Allen on a number of issues. "Claude is definitely a hard worker -- working on the GOP agenda to the utmost."
Allen's supporters dismiss such criticism as partisan sour grapes from people who don't know, or who ignore, Allen's full record. Gilmore chose him in 1995 to mobilize Virginia's efforts to end a series of arson attacks at African American churches across the South. Allen galvanized a broad coalition of church leaders and government officials into action, and the crimes were reduced, Gilmore said.
"Theirs is not an informed criticism," said Gilmore, a former Republican National Committee chairman, of Allen's critics. "People just don't know."
Allen says he's heard the criticism and lets it roll off his back, following advice that his grandfather gave him as a child:
"To know what I believe, know why I believe it, and be willing to stand up for it, regardless of the pressure that might come to force you to change or be ridiculed and the like."
Allen was a deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services before he joined the White House in January. He caught Bush's attention shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he briefed the president and the National Security Council on HHS's response.
In 2003, the president nominated Allen for a seat on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers a district from Maryland to the Carolinas. Virginia's NAACP chapter accused him of building his "career on the back of right-wing extremists."
Ultimately, Senate Democrats blocked the nomination, saying that Allen -- a Duke University Law graduate who spent nearly eight years clerking in federal District Court and four years in private practice -- lacked the proper legal experience.
Maryland Democratic Sens. Barbara Mikulski and Paul Sarbanes played major roles in quashing Allen's nomination by complaining that his appointment was to a seat traditionally filled by a Maryland resident.
But the failed nomination opened another door for Allen -- to the White House.
"My path has been public service, and serving where I've been called," Allen said. "The president and his senior staff asked me to consider coming here, and I did."
Allen, 44, was born in Philadelphia. Religion was a constant in his boyhood, first at his grandmother's Baptist church. When he was about 3, his family relocated to Washington, where Allen attended parochial school and his mother got a job in the school's rectory, so "we grew up Catholic." Today the Allen family attends the nondenominational Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md.
In Washington, Allen's father drove a plumbing-supply truck. The family later moved to the Raleigh area so Allen's mother could tend to aging relatives.
That move triggered a political and spiritual shift in Allen. As a high school student, he met Helms.
"What I heard about Senator Helms was negative: He didn't like blacks, didn't like women, didn't like programs for the poor," Allen recalled. "I talked with the senator. He wasn't what I thought he would be."
During Allen's freshman year at UNC Chapel Hill, "someone shared the gospel with me. I understood it for the first time and it's had an impact on my life ever since."
So did his meeting with Helms. Allen worked after college on the unsuccessful 1982 House campaign of Republican Bill Cobey, whom Helms backed.
While working for Cobey, Allen remained a registered Democrat, clinging to his family's tradition. His political transformation wasn't complete until a friend showed him unlabeled copies of the 1980 Democratic and Republican Party platforms and asked him which one he identified with.
"I said, `I agree with this one over here,' " Allen said. "He said, `Well, welcome to the Republican Party.' What struck me was the Republican platform really focused on the individual, on national defense, on strong families, on personal responsibility and opportunity."
Today, Allen and his wife, Jannese, have four home-schooled children, ages 1 to 12.
After the Cobey campaign, Allen became one of Helms' first African American political staffers, joining the 1984 re-election campaign against then-N.C. Gov. Jim Hunt as the senator's press secretary.
"What attracted me was the man himself, someone who I think is a man of great integrity, a man who was very kind to those with whom he worked," Allen said, even though he disagreed with Helms' strong opposition to the King holiday.
Often Allen found that he was the story during the campaign, as reporters from across the country interviewed him on how he, as an African-American, could work for someone as conservative as Helms.
Allen drew unwanted attention when he said Hunt was vulnerable because of his links "with the queers." In his 2003 confirmation hearing for the 4th Circuit judgeship, Allen testified that he was using the word in its dictionary meaning -- "odd, out of place, unusual."
Nevertheless, the "queers" comment and his longtime advocacy of sexual abstinence to prevent AIDS have fueled questions about how much his faith affects his policy-making decisions. Such concerns intensified after Bush weighed in on the Terri Schiavo case, signing a law in an unsuccessful effort to keep doctors from removing a feeding tube from the brain-damaged Florida woman, who died on March 31.
"My role here is policy," Allen said. "However, my faith is significant to me. I can't divorce myself from my faith nor would I want to do that. But what I am very careful of is not to let my politics interfere with my religion."
In his job, Allen meets with Bush several times a week.
"Our focus is to advise the president on policies that range from health care to education to housing to labor -- it's a very broad portfolio -- and to advise him on what's going on in the agencies in terms of all of these issues," Allen said.
"I think the most important job the domestic policy adviser serves is to take from the president his vision and put that into practice down through the agencies and the executive branch, and also working with the legislative branch to advise the Hill on it," Allen said.
Allen's mother didn't live long enough to see her son's success. She died of cancer in 1982, but before he death, Allen said, "She gave me her blessing to follow along with my life."
N.C. Ping?
I notice that even with old Jesse gone, that commie, butt kissing rag still takes pokes at him. They never could beat him.
Funny, I actually remember those days. I also remember a Republican party of that time wanting limited government. Too bad it's gone.
Our focus is to advise the president on policies that range from health care to education to housing to labor -- it's a very broad portfolio
Yeah Claude keep advising. We still have a little money left in our wallets...
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