© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Aug. 30, 2007

This is the sixth in a series of reviews on books written by the 2008 presidential contenders. See the archives for earlier reviews, and check back in the next few weeks for a look at John Edwards' "Ending Poverty In America." By Sam Brownback ISBN 084-99-0398-X Thomas Nelson 240 pp. Purchase This Book

With only a few months left until the Iowa caucuses, many Republican primary voters remain unsatisfied with their choices for the GOP's presidential nominee. Suspicion that the front-runners, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, are not genuine cultural conservatives has left an opening for other candidates to exploit. The support of values voters can catapult an overlooked candidate into a top-tier candidate and that is exactly the boost that Sam Brownback is counting on.

In his book "From Power to Purpose: A Remarkable Journey of Faith and Compassion," the Kansas senator lays out a domestic and foreign policy agenda that he hopes will get the attention of conservatives still searching for their candidate.

Much of the book is centered on Brownback's Christian worldview. This should come as no surprise as even the title strikes an inspirational tone. To pen this book, the senator enlisted the help of Jim Nelson Black, co-author of "I Have Seen The Kingdom: A Revelation Of God's Final Glory" and former executive director of the Wilberforce Forum, a think tank that seeks to promote Christianity in the public square. The forum is named for William Wilberforce, who is one of Brownback's two greatest role models (the other is Mother Teresa).

Wilberforce was a member of Britain's House of Commons in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, who dedicated himself to abolishing slavery and has been called "God's politician." Brownback draws a parallel between himself and Wilberforce with the history of "bleeding Kansas," in which abolitionists fought to make Kansas a free state. "I'm proud of the strong stand against slavery that my predecessors took."

Brownback makes a a similar connection with a modern-day issue, abortion. "Wilberforce's England is my America. Our battle today is similar to theirs. Our battlefield is the fight for life." He asserts the sanctity of life with scripture, though he doesn't rely entirely on the Bible for his argument. He attacks the foundation of a woman's right to choose, asserting that "the whole fabric of the legal battle that led to Roe v. Wade in 1973 was based on lies."

While Brownback's arguments are well-constructed, his rhetoric occassionally veers to the extreme. For example, on abortion he says, "we're in the midst of a genocide of children with Down syndrome." The sincerity of Brownback's views is not in question, but "genocide" is a very strong word. Such statements will strike some readers as bombastic and symptomatic of Brownback's trouble relating to his political opponents. To his credit, Brownback owns up to this, acknowledging that "to work with someone on the other side of the aisle, the first thing I have to do is to stop judging that person."

Like fellow conservative Mike Huckabee, Brownback wants to reform the criminal justice system. "The goal is to change each individual for the better on the inside, so that we're all better when they're on the outside." Turns of phrase such as this give the book a conversational tone. And catchy slogans like "I'm pro life for the whole life" make his views easy to understand and remember. But the line between informal and sloppy is razor-thin and Brownback sometimes falters while navigating it. The book suffers in spots from clunky sentences and typos. An anecdote about Mother Teresa that he tells twice leaves readers with a sense of déjà vu.

Other anecdotes detail his conversations with his Kansas constituents; Brownback rejects . the conventional wisdom that they "only wanted to hear about what was happening at home". He also discusses human rights violations in North Korea and the war in Iraq. But of all foreign locations, Africa is the most salient in the book. In fact, the back of the book's dust jacket features a picture of Brownback with a group of African children. The need to help Africa appears to be one of Brownback's most passionately held beliefs. He even helped develop an episode of TV's "Touched by an Angel" on the topic of genocide and slavery in Sudan. It is this fight against slavery that brings him back again to the abolitionists of Kansas and the advocacy of William Wilberforce.

References to faith are plentiful in "From Power To Purpose," so to allay any potential concerns of more secular readers, Brownback plainly states: "I am adamantly opposed to a theocracy." But just as Wilberforce was, Brownback strives to be a leader who will "use public life to serve the weak and to do God's will of caring for the downtrodden." The title "God's politician" may be taken, but if Brownback can make inroads with this country's values voters he might yet attain the title "God's president."

--Vincent Barranco, NationalJournal.com