Filed under: Economy and Politics
I watched a good chunk of the Rick Warren Forum this past Saturday night on CNN. I’d never heard of Warren before, though I was peripherally aware of his best-selling book “The Purpose Driven Life” and his Saddleback mega-church.
I thought Obama did fairly well. He wasn’t smooth and mellifluous, nor was he content with coming up with the right, trite answer. His answers to questions about abortion, marriage, and justice were the nuanced answers of a liberal-to-moderate Christian who has thought deeply about the complexities of leading a democracy. Considering that Obama, who was preaching to the unconverted, received several rounds of applause, Obama fans might even class his performance as a win.
McCain, on the other hand, was almost unwatchable. Yes, he’s a lovable old curmudgeon who has suffered for his country, and who should have been the Republican nominee back in 2000. And yes, his journey to nominee-hood this year was pretty much a cakewalk, but enough already.
Suffering may sometimes be noble, and McCain has had more than his share, but it doesn’t qualify anyone for political office. I soon found myself annoyed with his continuous references to his Hanoi Hilton experiences.
As for his age, McCain is still young enough to do almost anything, including jumping out of an airplane, but given the stress and rigours of the Oval Office job, and the real possibility of his popping at least one clog while the American people are “following” him, wouldn’t the most noble thing been for him to have bowed out of the race before he even put his name in the nomination hat?
In responding to Warren’s questions, McCain’s quick, pat answers may have sounded decisive to some, but they seemed shallow and superficial to me, answers crafted to preach to the cheap seats. The Saddleback crowd seemed to eat them up, applauding him more often and more enthusiastically than they did Obama, and not at all bored to hear the same set of questions posed a second time.
Some of McCain’s answers were so glib and fast on the draw that allegations have been made that he wasn’t in a cone of silence during Obama’s turn at the Warren confessional, and may have had an unfair advantage. Whether these allegations are true or not, it was clear that McCain was staying on the surface, pandering to the crowd, and telling them what he thought they wanted to hear.
Even if you believe life begins at conception, as McCain clearly stated he did, the political dimensions of abortion rights are complex. McCain supports the repeal of Roe v. Wade, though, unlike Obama, he does not seem to have given much thought to the underlying dynamics of unplanned pregnancies.
Perhaps the most telling moments, given that the forum took place in a church, were when the celebrity pastor asked each man to speak about his faith. Both began their responses with brief, stock summaries of the Christian faith. It was what happened next that was interesting.
Obama talked about the social gospel, indirectly referencing Matthew’s gospel and how poverty, racism, and sexism affect our society. McCain talked about his experience in the POW camp, one of several anecdotes he told that evening, a story that first appeared in his 1999 book, “Faith of My Fathers”.
On first hearing that story during the forum, I thought of the imprisonments of the Apostle Paul, and wondered if McCain was subtly attempting to create in his listeners a sense that he should be seen as a great, suffering leader. It was about that time that I began to tune him out. Not long after that the TV was flipped back to Olympic coverage.
Today, of course, the blogs are full of allegations that McCain lifted the entire “Cross in the Dirt” story from Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago.” Perhaps. Perhaps not. There is plenty of dirt on the planet, plenty of prisons where people are unjustly held, and possibly more than one inmate or guard who would be moved to share faith and encouragement in this simple way.
It’s beside the point for me. What it boils down to is that McCain, who leans too heavily on a single story to prove his evangelical cred, was far better received than Obama, who reminded the Saddleback believers that faith without works is dead.
In the end, this forum was probably just another media event that will not sway a significant number of votes. Most evangelical voters are already committed, and Obama’s chance for victory does not lie within that community, but rather in getting out the vote of the young and others who have not normally voted. It’s too early to get a feel for who will win, though it looks like Obama has the edge, however slight.
If he were running for President of Canada he would win hands down. His glamour, vision, and intellect would lead us to the kinder, gentler promised land we haven’t seen since the days of Pierre Elliott Trudeau; the sort of promised land that not all Americans would think of as democracy.
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