That John McCain was not, in fact, locked within a "cone of silence" during Rick Warren's questioning of Barack Obama on Saturday points to the whole problem of anointing a pastor the arbiter of a presidential forum -- or the arbiter of elections in general. A lot of the people pushing for the event in the first place were Democrats and Obama supporters -- and I don't think their cause was helped in the end. Making Warren the arbiter let him ask questions like the one he posed about a recent poll that showed that 70% of Americans believe that faith-based organizations can solve social problems better than the government can. Who conducted that poll? How was the question phrased? Who were the respondents? No one asks, no one requires Warren to substantiate it. Warren is a pastor, so he's implicitly trusted to be fair and forthright. While Obama was thought to have had the most to gain from the forum, he performed terribly -- mushy was the adjective that leapt to mind. Even his posture was hunched, like he didn't really believe some of the things he was saying. It's a hazard in part created by the campaign's overly enthusiastic effort to reach out to evangelicals. Because Obama wants so badly to reach those coveted evangelical voters, he was willing to submit himself to an environment in which he couldn't be unabashedly pro-choice, where he felt like he had to elevate the work of unaccountable faith-based organizations above government and secular NGOs, and where he had to pontificate on the nature of evil. It might have been billed as brave for a Democrat to step into a potentially hostile environment like that but Obama didn't rise to the occasion by coming across as tough, firm, and passionate in his beliefs. Showing your Christian values doesn't mean you have to be so genial and accommodating that you fail to come across as a leader.
