CLARENCE PAGESyndicated columnist

WASHINGTON – A lot of naysayers are picking apart President Bush’s choice of conservative TV host and commentator Tony Snow to be his new press secretary. Depending on whom you read or listen to, Tony’s either too conservative, too anti-Bush, too loyal, too independent, outspoken or maybe just too darn good-looking for the job.

Not me. I think his selection is smart public relations, which is what the job is all about.

In this era of relentless news cycles, the press secretary is an administration’s most visible day-to-day connection with the public. As Bush enters his last 1,000 days in office with approval ratings barely above 30 percent, Snow replaces the tight-lipped, constantly uncomfortable-looking Scott McClellan with a smiley face so convivial, quick-witted and camera-worthy as to require the invention of TV, were it not around already.

And he has a brain. Even while hosting for the rightward-tilted Fox News Channel and on radio, his pointed jabs at the Bush administration’s ineffectiveness show he’s more than a megaphone for the administration. That Bush stands by Snow despite such criticisms, pointing out that Snow fired bigger shots at &#8220the other guys,” makes Bush sound like a broad-minded man, even if it doesn’t say much about whether he actually listens to such criticism.

Yet, even before Bush confirmed reports of Snow’s appointment, liberal critics flooded the Internet with evidence that Snow is, of all things, a conservative!

And, as if that wasn’t objectionable enough, he’s an outspoken conservative!

Well, guess what, folks? A conservative like Bush is not going to appoint Michael Moore.

But, Tony is no refugee from the goofy wing of conservatism. In the 15 years I have known him professionally, he has repeatedly impressed me as a man of conscience, who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations, when some of his fellow Republicans don’t. When he’s not trying to adopt the Rush-Limbaugh/Bill O’Reilly demagogue pose, he’s a guy who sheds more light than heat. His critics do themselves a disservice when they blur that distinction.

I was particularly disappointed to find one of the controversial quotes that have come back to haunt him, since it was unfairly ripped out of the context of one of my columns.

A press release from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, for example, recounted the quote like this:

&#8220In 1991, then-White House speechwriter Tony Snow defended former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, saying, &#8220Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of politicians aren’t talking about these things.”

In fact, as his original quote appeared in my Nov. 20, 1991, column in the Chicago Tribune, Tony was not defending Duke. Rather, he was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in Louisiana’s governor’s race. Tony wanted me to know that, just as those of us who attended Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March were not all acting out of black supremacy or anti-Semitism, neither were all Duke voters motivated by racism.

&#8220You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists,” he said. &#8220Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of politicians aren’t talking about these things.” If mainstream politicians don’t listen to the frustrations of ordinary people, and address them in some constructive way, Tony was saying, the loony extremists inevitably will move in.

Time magazine columnist Joe Klein’s new book, &#8220Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid,” is an instructive example. In 1968, he recounts, numerous white voters in the South supported both the liberal Robert F. Kennedy and the archconservative George Wallace for president, because they both projected concern for &#8220the little guy.”

Today conservative cable TV and radio talk show hosts make big bucks projecting that same concern, genuine or not. Meanwhile, the fact that Democrats have lost all but three presidential races since 1968 can be traced in part back to their losing those ordinary white folks who for decades had been the party’s natural constituency.

Tony Snow understands why Democrats lost touch and how Republicans capitalized on it. Now in his final 1,000 days as president, it is Bush who seems to have lost touch. He’s saddled with a quagmire in Iraq, soaring fuel prices at home and subterranean approval ratings. He has a lot to learn from people like Tony Snow who know how to win the public’s confidence. So do the Democrats.

There’s a call to Muslims for needed reform

By BILL TAMMEUS, Syndicated columnist

WASHINGTON – Asra Q. Nomani still feels heartbroken – even guilty – about the death of her former Wall Street Journal colleague, reporter Daniel Pearl, whom terrorists murdered in Pakistan in 2002.

Pearl and his wife, Mariane, had been staying with her in her apartment in Karachi when he disappeared Jan. 23, 2002, after leaving for an interview with a spiritual leader. Asra and Mariane searched for him for weeks. But he died at the hands of fanatics who cared more for their twisted version of Islam than they did for Danny’s life.

Asra, a Muslim, was furious with Islam because of Pearl’s murder. As she reports in her book, &#8220Standing Alone,” &#8220In my heart, I felt fear and loathing for my religion.”

She left Pakistan, where she was a journalist, too, and returned to her parents’ home in Morgantown, W.Va.

&#8220I went into a fetal position in my parents’ house, saying, ‘I hate Islam,”’ she told me.

Who could blame her for such angst? Islamic extremists, after all, had traumatized her life, murdering a close friend. They had pulled off 9/11. They had tortured Israel with suicide bombings. And they had taken her religion and turned it into a deadly political and ideological weapon.

But she’s discovered that her anger was misplaced.

She says they aren’t standing up strongly and loudly enough to this polluted version of Islam. Her parents, she says, helped to change her attitude about Islam by showing her &#8220a personification of an expression of Islam that didn’t have to be violent.”

So she wrote her book (just out in paperback) about her struggles inside Islam. In it she argues that Muslims need to challenge Islam. Their complaints, she says, must be raised whenever Muslims still holds to a 7th-century mentality. But she has paid a price for confronting Muslims publicly.

&#8220The ugly e-mails I get from Muslims who think they’re being pious makes me feel sad about the Muslim world,” she says. Putting up with all of this &#8220gets really dark and morose and difficult.”

She spoke one recent evening to a seminar I attended here on religion in America. And I left wondering how Asra Nomani will be perceived in, say, 10 or 50 years. Will she be seen as a female Muslim Martin Luther?

Probably not. For one thing, it’s difficult in any religion today to make the kind of difference Luther did, much less a religion that has more than 1 billion adherents around the world. Beyond that, many Muslims see Nomani as morally compromised because she bore a child out of wedlock, &#8220ignoring,” she acknowledges, &#8220the rulings of sharia (Islamic law).”

And yet Nomani insists that Muslims in America – who number anywhere from 3 million to more than 10 million, depending on who’s counting – are at a crucial stage.

&#8220We’re at this crossroads in America right now,” she says, &#8220because there are these Muslims who challenge what the people who are in power are saying.” Many American Muslims, she says, have quit attending mosques (some estimates put the &#8220un-mosqued” at more than 70 percent) because they are disaffected with what she calls an &#8220Old World” faith that conservative immigrant imams preach.

She has insisted on equality for women in mosques and has said that given the current conservative atmosphere in many Muslim schools, she will not send her son to one: &#8220I’m not alone in this. There are just all these people who’ve become disconnected.”

She notes that in the broad spectrum of Islam there are several different schools of law, or jurisprudence, each with slightly different views of how the religion should be lived based on different interpretations of the Quran and other sacred writing. All those schools have their roots in the 8th or 9th century, she says.

&#8220There has to be a new school of law for the 21st century,” Nomani says. And she says this kind of transformation is almost inevitable: &#8220All you have to do is read about what’s happened in other religions to see where it’s going.”

That’s the sort of talk that makes enemies for Nomani. She knows that. But she says she can’t do anything but what she’s doing. Even if it continues to mark her as a rebel, she says, her direction has been set.