Obamarama

Obama is even wowing the Fundies:

American politics took an important turn last week at a church in the foothills of Southern California’s Santa Ana Mountains.

When Rick Warren, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.

For his part, Obama, the former community organizer from Chicago, showed why he is this moment’s hottest commodity in 2008 presidential politics, even though he has not entered the race yet.

For a quarter-century since the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, white evangelical Christians have widely been seen as a Republican preserve. No one did a more comprehensive job of organizing them than President Bush, and he carried the white evangelical vote in 2004 over John Kerry by a margin of nearly 4-1. Many of the most politically active evangelical leaders have insisted that the morally freighted social issues—abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage—took priority over all questions.

[...]

That Obama received a standing ovation suggests that Warren is right to sense that growing numbers of Christians are tired of narrowly partisan politics and share his interest in “the whole bird.’’ In their different spheres, Warren and Obama are both in the business of retailing hope.

One more thing: If you read Obama’s speech, you’ll realize he demonstrates a much truer Christian spirit than the GOP masterminds who have recently tried to push people away from Obama by pointing out that his middle name is “Hussein.’’

Yeah, I've noticed that suddenly his middle name is being used by certain types. The folks who are trying to put his light under a bushel by ethnically linking him to our enemies are really low and desperate. But this is one reason why I do not want him to run in 2008. He's a decent guy so far and it's really hard to get too far and remain that way.