Obama's gaffe

Some of Obama's answers at the Saddleback Presidential Forum are being portrayed as gaffes. Now that I've had a chance to browse the transcript, I think his biggest mistake was showing up at all.

In a general sense, there was no way that allowing a pastor to give him and McCain a series of religious litmus tests could go well for him. I also think having the first debate be a theological one is bad symbolism for a secular political race.

More specifically, though, many of the questions were clearly loaded towards the conservative view; they were questions that conservatives have glib bumper-sticker slogans for, but progressives find more nuanced. In my opinion Obama was being set up; the goal was clearly to get him to say something that could be used as a damaging sound byte. Questions like, "...at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?" were clearly designed to provoke a big applause line from McCain and a lot of dithering from Obama.

The worst example, though, was this question:

Does evil exist? And if it does, do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?

The very premise of this question is based on an oversimplified, neoconservative view of the world — a cartoon universe where people divide neatly into good guys and bad guys. G.I. Joe and Cobra. It's really more complicated than that, and it's destructive to think of the world that way, but there's no way of saying so without creating a wishy-washy sounding sound byte. McCain, of course, fully embraces that view, so he was able to simply say "defeat it," and then promise to follow bin Laden "to the gates of hell" if necessary. Big applause, good sound byte for his ads.

I hope Obama doesn't fall for any more McCain campaign events disguised as debates.