God For Granted

Are evangelicals an important block of voters?

The Pew Research Center estimates about 20 to 25 per cent of U.S. voters are evangelical and, for the past eight years, they have voted overwhelmingly Republican.

Wow. That's a lot of people. And that's one of the reasons that Democrats are so excited about Barack, and why even party management views him as the magic man - because he is born again, he can "talk their language," and be comfortable appearing at events like Pastor Rick Warren's conversation with the candidates this weekend.

Will it, in fact, change the outcome? Evangelicals have had a very difficult relationship with John McCain - he was downright rejecting of them 8 years ago, so now is the time to rewrite the storyline if it's ever going to be rewritten.

But even with the relative ambivalence evangelicals have toward McCain, the Pew Center poll found Obama has just 24 per cent support among white evangelicals - roughly the same as 2004 Democratic nominee, John Kerry.

And that was before Barack's abortion gaffe on Saturday eve, when he attempted to slide past a question about when human rights accrue to the unborn.

“I think that whether you are looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.”

In its entirety, his answer wasn't so bad as that snippet makes it sound - Barack seemed to realize immediately that his choice of words was poor. But that will be the clip that lives in infamy.

Fox News Blogger Father Jonathan Morris explains that Barack, and the rest of us, simply don't understand evangelical voters - we are naive in thinking that just because he can talk to Christians mean they'll ignore his politics.

The logical flaw here is the assumption that active Christians judge a candidate primarily by his religious talk. The recent American religious experience is full of scandal. The regular churchgoer is now rather unimpressed by words alone and is particularly attentive to behavior inconsistent with Biblical standards. Action, or in the case of politics, policy, is their best indication a politician can be trusted to govern wisely.

It was, ironically, Barack's talk that got him into trouble.

What I find disturbing is that while Senator Obama says he doesn’t know when babies get rights, he has always felt comfortable voting to refuse the right to life to all pre-born babies, even ones who are aborted outside of the womb, through partial birth abortion or, shockingly, even after a botched abortion. Senator Obama doesn’t know if these babies have human rights, and still he is willing to vote in favor of letting them die?

Morris also was offended by Barack's answer on the question regarding which Supreme Court Justices he wouldn't have appointed.

Senator Obama named Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. But strangely, he considered it necessary to twice demean along the way the intelligence of Justice Thomas, the second and currently only black Supreme Court Justice of the United States of America. Obama said Justice Thomas isn’t a “strong enough jurist or legal thinker” and then backhanded Thomas’ intellect once again by saying that while he disagrees with Justice Scalia’s constitutional interpretations, he doesn’t doubt his (in comparison to Thomas’) “intellectual brilliance.”

Senator Obama’s response here was curious for another reason. He chose not to list at first the two newest members of the court, Justices Roberts and Alito, even though he voted against their confirmation in the Senate.

McCain had no problem answering this question in a manner that resonated with the audience, just as he did when he answered the human rights for the unborn question with the succinct, "at conception."

Senator McCain answered this second question by immediately listing all four liberal judges on the bench, with no explanations needed. His audience understood everything. Above all, they came to know him as one of them.

The lesson from Saturday’s forum is that when a politician’s political policy doesn’t match voters’ core religious teachings, the prettier the language the more stinky it is.

The little discussed backbone to liberal confidence that Barack can rewrite the electoral map and win this election, despite his inadequacies as a candidate, lies in the idea that he will bump that evangelical vote tally for the Democrat higher this year. They may have miscalculated.