By: Helena Andrews

‘Everybody’s got values,” said Leah Daughtry.

That includes Democrats as well as Republicans, according to Daughtry, who, on the phone from Denver, speaks in the smooth alto and full sentences of a practiced orator.

The poli-sci-major-turned-Pentecostal-preacher describes herself as “a pastor, a preacher, a person of faith.” She doesn’t mention that she’s a political powerhouse who has made the V-word her party’s new mantra — first as chief of staff for the Democratic National Committee and now as CEO of the Democratic convention in August.

In 2005, Daughtry created the Faith in Action Initiative to “ensure that there is ongoing, authentic outreach to communities of faith,” she said. The seven-member group meets regularly to map out the left’s new strategy on religion, which doesn’t involve ignoring it. The New York Times called her “the quiet architect.”

She does not, however, plan to build a church.

“You can’t show up on the doorstep of a voter the last Sunday in October and say, ‘Please vote for me,’” she said. Fast-forward just three years after the faith team was assembled, and the words “Democrat” and “devout” don’t seem so distant.

The first official convention event this summer in Denver will be a large “interfaith gathering.” This year will also be the first time the Democrats host a People of Faith Caucus. Daughtry also made sure ordained clergy have positions on the convention’s various standing committees.

“Truly, this is going to go down as a legacy and change in the Democratic Party that would not have been possible without Leah or someone like her in this position,” said Matt Dorf, who advises the DNC on issues within the Jewish community as a member of the Faith in Action Initiative.

Dorf quickly amended, “There’s no one else like her.”

Another member of the faith team, Abdul Malik Mujahid, an imam in Chicago, called Daughtry “one calm, collected, cool creature.”

Language plays a major role in Daughtry’s reimagining of the party.

“We really believe that we can find common ground with anyone, but you’ve gotta have the conversation,” said Daughtry. “That’s not to say we’ll agree with everyone, with every single thing, but at least you create the atmosphere of dialogue.”

Appending the language of politics (“exit polls,” “voters,” “big tent”) to the language of religion (“values,” “morals,” “Scripture”) is nothing new for Daughtry, who has made it her job to sort through the babble and come up with broad appeal.

“The language of the Democratic Party will change,” said Tony Campolo, an evangelical pastor who sits on the convention’s platform committee. Campolo added that the best thing about working with Daughtry “is that you don’t have to explain things to her.”

Daughtry is pastor of a small congregation of the House of the Lord Church in Southwest Washington. Her grandfather founded the church in 1930, and her father is senior pastor of the flock in Brooklyn, where Daughtry was raised. On the church’s website is this verse from the Book of James: “Be ye not bearers of the word but doers also.”

“I don’t know Leah through politics,” said A.G. Miller, a member of the House of the Lord’s national board of elders, the church’s highest governing body. Instead, said Miller, he watched Daughtry “grow up in the church.”

Miller could have been describing Daughtry when he described the church as “not typical,” specifically because it has never shied away from politics.

“The gospel is not apolitical,” said Miller, “but it was always seen as what it meant to express one’s faith. It is important for one to have one’s faith in the public square.”

Daughtry said she was raised not to focus on just her own “individual salvation, God or creator — or whatever people choose to call him” but to focus on the community, as well. She quoted Psalm 127:3 by way of further explanation: “Children are the inheritance of the Lord.”

“If that’s what I believe, then I’ve got to fight for legislation that ensures that the principle of my faith is enacted,” she explained matter-of-factly. “Children’s health insurance is important to me.”

But even for Daughtry, for whom public service is a demonstration of piety, coming to Washington wasn’t pre­destined. “I have to be honest, my entire goal was to get out of my mother’s house,” she said, laughing. She first came to Capitol Hill to work for family friend Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) in the early 1980s.

She said that when she would visit Towns’ district office in Brooklyn, she would learn what legislation “actually meant for the dry cleaner on Myrtle Avenue.”

“Politics [was] not this abstract sort of thing that those people in Washington did,” she said.

According to Towns, “power didn’t mean anything to her.” Daughtry, he continued, can talk to anybody, build coalitions, make people comfortable while getting something out of them. “That is Leah Daughtry.”

She “had the flair to say the right thing at the right time and to do the right thing at the right time,” he said.

Now that the Democratic Party wants to get right with the Lord, Daughtry is making that possible.

“I’ve always been in the party, and I’ve always been a person of faith,” said Daughtry. “I don’t think it’s a novel thing.”

Copyright © 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC | Distributed by Noofangle Media