Candidates make their appeals to evangelicals

By Carrie Budoff Brown - Politico
Monday, August 18, 2008 - Web Link
Send this news item to a Friend
Sign-up for Daily News Updates

August 17, 2008

Until recently, an event like this would have been unimaginable: The Democratic and Republican presidential nominees meeting at a megachurch to face questioning from an evangelical preacher.

Today’s forum in southern California, hosted by best-selling author Rick Warren, will be remarkable not just as the first joint appearance for John McCain and Barack Obama but as a new marker at the crossroads of religion and politics.

“I have been wracking my brain, I can’t think of an instance in a political campaign that the Democratic and Republican nominees appear side by side in a church,” said John C. Green, a senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. “This is unique in a couple of respects. They are in a church, hosted by a pastor and both are there.”

For years, most Democratic presidential candidates avoided campaign trail discussion of faith and values, ceding the ground to Republicans who, in turn, solidified their already strong electoral advantages among religious voters.

But the usual dynamic is not at play this year. More so than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Obama talks regularly about his Christian faith, reflecting both his own mid-20s conversion, which has played a key role in the portrait of himself he’s drawn in his two books and on the campaign trail, and his need to battle a mostly beneath-the-radar rumor campaign falsely claiming he is a Muslim.

Chastened by John Kerry’s narrow loss in 2004 — and exit polls showing that the so-called God gap played a key role in that loss — Democratic leaders have been on a mission to reframe the values debate by appealing to a generation that polls show is more receptive to considering candidates with differing views on abortion and other hot-button issues — and whose support Obama has aggressively courted.