Just in time for the elections, former drug czar William Bennett and faith-based programs guru David Kuo are launching a new website designed to be the conservative answer to Slate.
LibertyWire, which starts publishing Aug. 13, will be “big tent right-of-center,” according to its listing for writers on a University of California, Berkeley, jobs board.
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The slant will be “as open-minded about what we publish as The New Republic, The New Yorker or The New York Times Magazine, but on the center-right rather than the center-left,” according to the posting.
The site’s CEO is Kuo, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush. An evangelical Christian with impeccable conservative credentials, Kuo has worked for a gamut of political leaders from John Ashcroft to Ted Kennedy.
He was the No. 2 man in Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, but later savaged the administration with his book Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, saying that “Republicans were indifferent to the poor” and failed to fulfill the president’s promise of compassionate conservatism.
Bennett is the chairman of LibertyWire, according to a post on The New Republic’s blog, Plank. The brother of Washington lawyer Robert S. Bennett, Bill Bennett was a Cabinet member for both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and is now the host of radio show, Morning in America.
Although he has written or edited about a dozen books, he is best-known for The Book of Virtues, which later became a source of embarrassment after he was revealed to be a high-stakes gambler, who had lost $1 million in Las Vegas. He later swore off gambling.
Bennett was an early mentor to Kuo, hiring him as a deputy director for Empower America, a conservative think tank he co-founded in 1993 with former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp and the late Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick.
Who is funding the website, and for how much, is unknown.
Rival Slate, which was founded by Microsoft Corp., had deep pockets to hire and keep top-tier writers and editors and that has continued under the Washington Post Co., which purchased the online magazine in 2004.
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