Saddleback

Barry Lynn doesn’t think Barack Obama should have agreed to appear at the presidential forum hosted by Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church on Saturday. Lynn argues that the evangelical megachurch was GOP home turf and thus the whole thing was a trap and a set-up the Democratic candidate should have avoided. Lynn thinks Warren’s questions for the two candidates were biased and full of Republican talking points.

Alan Wolfe, on the other hand, points out that Warren’s church forum didn’t offer nearly as many biased questions and GOP talking points as the average CNN panel or that god-awful Charlie Gibson debacle on ABC a few months back.

But I will concede part of Lynn’s point: Rick Warren was bound to ask certain questions framed to have a right answer and a wrong answer. The answers he knew John McCain would give would be the right answers and the answers he knew Barack Obama would give would be the wrong answers. But Lynn is wrong to consider that a trap. It’s an opportunity.

The big question of this forum, of course, is the litmus-test question that has overshadowed all others for evangelical voters over the past 30 years: legal abortion. Lynn thinks the big news coming out of the forum was that the megachurch audience cheered wildly when John McCain gave the “right” answer to this question. But the bigger news was that the audience didn’t boo when Barack Obama gave the “wrong” answer.

Part of the issue here, as Noam Scheiber points out, is that McCain had nothing to gain from telling this audience what they expected him to say. He drew some praise from audience members for answering this question so quickly and “decisively.” But everyone knew what was really going on. John McCain was being quizzed on the Republican catechism. He was able to provide the correct answers, but he did so with all the conviction of a student who had memorized those answers by rote.

And what about Barack Obama? The Democratic senator wasn’t there to try to win evangelical votes by touting his support for abortion rights. Nor was he there hoping to persuade them to change their minds on that question. What he did instead was this: He disagreed with them. Here was a man, not a monster, respectfully disagreeing with them. He seemed reasonable, thoughtful. He was familiar with the scriptures and with the language of church people — familiar as in family. And yet he disagreed with them.

Hunh. Imagine that. Devout members of the family supposedly never disagreed on this. The people who disagreed were supposedly never reasonable or thoughtful. The people who disagreed were supposedly monsters. This guy was none of that. I wonder if that means …

That’s it. That’s all he could hope to accomplish there, before this audience, when he knew that he’d be confronted with this question. And that’s what I think he did accomplish. Not bad for a Saturday evening.

The bottom line was that John McCain went to Saddleback to try to get white evangelical voters to like him; Barack Obama went to Saddleback to show white evangelical voters that he liked them. I think they both succeeded. As such, I think McCain achieved something easy and Obama achieved something important.