There, there. He’s a Republican. Therefore he must be close to God.
I’ve heard similar things, which is why I’m not completely gonzo against the idea. I’ve heard frequently that religious types (polled) are broadening out from the main moral majority points of pro-life and anti gay marriage into poverty, health care, environmental concerns, etc.
Even if Obama doesn’t win any votes out of the deal, he could reduce the passion of those against him. I think there’s more for McCain to lose here than Obama.
I like it.
I’m a member of the United Church of Christ, which was Obama’s church before the Wright debacle.
I don’t always agree with Warren, but I have some respect for him.
I will be watching avidly.
Obama should do better than McCain. The United Church of Christ spends a lot of time talking about social justice and how Christianity calls us to be people who work to change things.
I have no beef with social justice or any of the other good works that religion calls people to. I object to the public display of fidelity to the religious organizations and their fundamentals. It’s a show - a sham - and says more about the country than it ever could about these men. My hope is that the more decent of the men is eventually elected on the basis of what we know about him, separate from these staged declarations of obeisance. And of course, there will be the requisite litmus tests for the right wing, too. This is a pathetic statement about the state of our so-called educated electorate. I can’t wait until it’s over.
I don’t have any interest in a candidate’s religious beliefs, and I don’t like the idea of them having to go grovel before some self-appointed morality expert (especially a homophobic, creationist, self-promoting tool like this guy) and answer his irrelevant questions, and I hope it’s not a precedent.
Having said all that, I think it’s probably somewhat necessary for Obama to do something like this simply to stomp on the persistant smears about him being a secret Muslim, if nothing else.
If they’re going to set this kind of precedent, I also want to see them answer questions from a rabbi, an imam, a Wiccan priestess, Richard Dawkins and Tom Cruise.
One of these days I’m going to have to break down and get cable. Seems silly when I watch almost no TV outside of football season, but then I miss stuff like this, or the debates during the primaries.
Wonder if anyone’s streaming it over the Web.
How do you see Rick Warren as homophobic?
I saw him on Larry King saying that homosexuality was “unnatural.”
Now THAT I would pay to see! 
Homosexuality is “unnatural”, he says?
No, no. Listen. Driving a car is “unnatural”. Living in concrete apartment blocks and eating edible food-like substances is “unnatural”.
But that’s neither here nor there. I wish, for the sake of all the sensible people in the US, that candidates for political office could ignore this sort of thing and could refuse to appear with men like Warren.
I won’t live long enough to see it, but maybe it will happen one day.
Barack is doing pretty well, I guess. He’s smooth. No gaffes. The questions aren’t exactly hard-jitting, but they’re somewhat intriguing. “What is America’s greatest moral failure?” is kind of a minefield. I wonder what McCain will say to that. I wnder what he’ll say is his own greatest moral failure. Will he mention his adultery?
I think this is better than any of the debates have been. That last question (Which Supreme Court justice would you not have nominated?) was great and exactly the kind of thing that I would like to ask of a Presidential candidate.
I agree that Obama is doing well. He’s waffled a bit on the marriage question but taken others head on (Constitutional amendment against it). Maybe this is my bias talking, but I can’t think that McCain will come out of this looking good, even though he’s going to have the “right” answers.
Very different styles. Obama was definitely more nuanced, but that ended up with him not really answering many of the questions. McCain was forceful and direct. I’m not going to get into who “won”, since that would depend on the audience. I’m sure most Obama supporters will think he won, and I’m sure most McCain supporters will think he won. I don’t think either stumbled, and for those who are undecided, it may play a bit more in Obama’s favor. I say that because I think he’s less well known, and there wasn’t anything controversial about his answers.
Two points of annoyance. Maybe this is just me, personally, but I winced every time McCain said “my friends” and I squirmed a little at all the stuttering Obama did at the beginning of his responses. The former seemed a bit patronizing, and the latter seemed like he was too concerned with saying just the right thing.
One more thing: It seemed pretty obvious that Warren favored McCain. He just seemed more engaged and connected to the answers McCain gave.
Been reading articles, still haven’t seen it- and as I’m sure you know, McCain’s answer was “the failure of my first marriage”. Not as detailed as one might prefer, but still wasn’t totally ignored.
Supposedly there are people out there who think that McCain is pro-choice, and I could see last night impacting their votes. But other than that, I don’t really see much of a shift from this. I think McCain had far more to lose from this type of venue, and he did what he needed to do. Obama held his own. It’d be nice to have a forum like this held by a liberal Christian or non-evangelical group though. I don’t know why the conservative evangelicals get all the air time.
I watched it last night, and the story McCain told about the prison guard drawing a cross in the dirt seemed to be incredibly phony. As it turns out, it appears to be stolen from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipalego”.
- Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.
On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.
Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.
As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.
Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.*That story is significantly different from McCain’s. What makes you think he stole it?
It was interesting that Obama was constantly warned against roaming into “stump speech” territory, whereas McCain said, overall, almost nothing that is not rote stump-speech material for him. He was not warned repeatedly to avoid that though, so I guess you can’t blame him. I blame Warren.
Essentially, this was a laundry list of questions that are easy to answer if you agree with Warren, and more difficult to answer if you do not. McCain filled in all the blanks like a good boy, and did so with succinctness and a measure of charm. He certainly passed with flying colors, but for McCain it was a gut course. I will say though, that Warren was probably more generous to Obama than many of his ilk would have been. At the very least, he spoke of Obama’s Christian faith as if it were a foregone conclusion, and not some debatable mysterious enigma. But this for me hilighted the unfortunate aspects of Obama, his pandering on the gay marriage issue and his need to construct elaborate examples of his christianity.
I will say, on the gay marriage issue, his noting that gay couples have zero impact on his own marriage, and his saying that his “confidence in the strength of [his] marriage” made him unconcerned about gay couples seeking similar rights, brought me back around to him. This is a good point and should be made more often and more forcefully. It’s a backhand way of trivializing the incredibly silly concerns of gay-marriage opponents.
What the hell was with the “evil” question?
Adjusted for context, it’s not clear to me how you can say that the story is significantly different.
Also, while I personally don’t disbelieve the story, I have to admit that I don’t really believe it either. It just seems a little too perfect; similar to a “we came under heavy sniper fire in Bosnia” tale.
Also, it’s a perfect political anecdote in that I don’t see how it can be fact-checked.
Oh, give me a break. Do people come up to prisoners routinely and silently draw crosses in the dirt?
John McCain worete a 12,000 word piece for US News and World Report right after getting back to the US in 1973 in which he wrote extensively about his experiences, mentioning religion and his relationship with his prison guards. He somehow failed to mention this story that he would “never forget”.
It’s a complete lie and he said it to a Pastor in a church in a conversation about his faith.