- Between Obama and McCain, McCain is the extrovert.
- McCain’s a one issue guy. National security. It didn’t matter what the question was about, McCain would talk about security.
- Obama is a really thoughtful guy.
- McCain sometimes says things that don’t make sense. He’ll switch from one talking point to another mid sentence, so he’ll say something like, “It’s been proven that choice and competition all Americans should be able to send their children to whatever school they want to.”
- I wonder how much the crowd affects perceptions the outcome. The biggest applause lines of the evening were (anti) gay-marriage and (anti) abortion.
- After Obama’s stunningly successful world tour, people were wondering why polls didnt swing dramatically in his favor. I suspect it was because he left the country and people sort of wondered where he went for a few weeks. An event like this could help him a lot more.
- McCain doesn’t like questions like “What does your faith mean to you.” His answer was something like, “It mean’s I’m saved. Uh, I’m redeemed. Let me tell you a story about when I was a prisoner of war.” (I am not making this up.)
- Obama has a much better thought out economic plan than McCain. McCain seems to be proposing massive hikes in military spending which he will counter with cuts in pork. The problem is that the hikes will cost billions while the cuts will save millions. Beyond that, he wants to further cut taxes.
- Whatever the doubters thought, this really was a well moderated, useful forum. If I could change anything, I would have wanted a more diverse crowd.
I haven’t watched the full session at Saddleback, but I was alerted to it by “Meet The Press” this morning, where a few clips were shown … the one about evil in our world caught my attention the most. Rick Warren asked each candidate how he feels we should deal with evil: negotiate with it? ignore it? fight it?
The first response was Obama’s, citing that we need to understand where evil is taking a stronghold (in places far away like Darfur or at home with domestic violence and poverty). The crowd reaction to this response was not included in the clip, but I’d assume it would be along the lines of polite applause.
McCain’s featured response to the same question: “Defeat it.” (break for rousing audience response)
Credit McCain for knowing the right thing to say for his given audience, but don’t glorify that response as the right thing to say. You’re in a church environment, where the members of the audience would ostensibly be evangelical Christians in pursuit of “Good” … Evil? Defeat it!
I’m not sure if the question was meant to imply “Evil in Iraq” or “Evil in Afghanistan,” but it seems like both candidates responded as though that was the intent … Instead of biting on the loaded question, Obama points out several ways evil is present at home and abroad that make the question difficult to answer. Of course evil is bad, and we need to stop evil when we can, but there isn’t a blanket answer to stop all of the evils in the world.
McCain’s response was more like “Let’s defeat the bad guys … Sunni … Shia … It’s not important which one’s which, but we’ll make sure we defeat the evil ones.”
At some point the idea of “evil” politically morphed from the evil referenced by the Lord’s Prayer as a force that is ever-present in everyone to evil personified by extremists, and that is very unfortunate.
It’s interesting to juxtapose the “Defeat It” response with the Great Commission and the life of Jesus. How do long-term missionaries from the churches effectively communicate the gospel? They assimilate into a culture, respecting the peoples’ beliefs and perspectives while hoping to convey by word and deed the concepts of grace, forgiveness and salvation. Jesus talked about evil as an object of daily struggle, not as some cosmic “end-of-game Boss” that can be defeated. It seems like Obama respects the reach and significance of evil and wants to combat it in the most effective ways possible.
