Blazing Saddleback

tauringhuang.

Aug 21st 2008 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

John McCain rallies


IT IS an interesting comment on American politics that the first encounter between the two presidential candidates took place in a mega-church presided over by a famous preacher. It is an interesting comment on the American media that Rick Warren—Pastor Rick to the faithful at his church, Saddleback, in California—put on such an impressive performance. He eschewed the gotcha-in-a-flip-flop questions beloved of professional journalists in favour of substantive questions about the candidates’ characters and beliefs. He should be asked to moderate the debates.

AP

Rick Warren and friendsBarack Obama was everything you might expect—thoughtful and intelligent. But he was also long-winded and at times evasive. The real revelation of the evening was John McCain. He came across as feisty and full of life. A bit bombastic, certainly, and a bit too inclined to rely on his stump speech. But he nevertheless seemed like a man who knew his mind and could sell his beliefs with a joke and an anecdote.

Much of this week has been devoted to digesting the debate. The Obama forces seized on reports suggesting that Mr McCain might have sneakily listened to the questions as he drove to the church in his motorcade. (Mr Warren asked both men the same questions in consecutive interviews, and Mr Obama went first.) The Obama forces also argued that Mr McCain might have fabricated one of his most effective anecdotes, about a kindly prison guard drawing a cross in the dirt, a story that only came to light in a book published in 1999, 26 years after he left captivity.

Whether any of these accusations is true may never be known. Mr McCain’s staff claims that he abided by the rules, and Mr Warren points out that he told both candidates some of the questions. Only Mr McCain knows the truth of the cross-in-the-dirt story. But it is hard to escape the impression that the Obama forces were trying to distract attention from what was clearly a victory for the other side.

It is foolish to read too much into a single encounter. But the debate suggested that the Obama campaign will find it more difficult than it expected to portray Mr McCain as old and out-of-touch. If anything, he came across as the more energetic of the two.

It also suggested that the Democrats will find it harder than they had hoped to win over—or at least neutralise—the evangelical vote. Mr McCain went a long way towards reassuring a group with which he has traditionally had problems with an uncompromising answer on when life begins (“at the moment of conception”). Mr Obama was notably evasive on abortion. Conservatives later pointed out that, as a state legislator in Illinois, he had voted against the “Born Alive” act, which obliges hospitals to care for babies that survive an attempted abortion.

The Saddleback debate ushered in a difficult week for Mr Obama. On August 20th a Reuters/Zogby poll showed Mr McCain notching up a five-point lead over him, reversing a seven-point advantage in July and marking the biggest lead any poll has ever given the Republican. Mr McCain even led Mr Obama by nine points on who would be the best manager of the economy, supposedly a Democratic strength. The large tax cuts all round that Mr McCain is promising may have something to do with that. As attention turns to Denver, where the Democratic convention opens on August 25th, Mr Obama can surely expect a bounce in the polls. But the party’s power-brokers no longer have quite the same spring in their step.