RERUNS: THE MMTP ARCHIVE

Episode 33: Preaching to the Choir

By Lee Molloy

For our reality series Make Me The President, we scoured the country to find the most power-hungry, Machiavellian and downright unattractive people in the United States of America (“The Greatest Nation On Earth” ™) to find the man, or woman, who could raise the most money, be willing to break the most promises and offer the most bland reason to become — The President.

This week on MMTP:

Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain were in Lake Forest, Calif., for the Civil Forum hosted by religious superstar Rick Warren at his Saddleback megachurch. This was the first time that the two contestants stood on stage together since becoming the presumptive champs of their respective teams. Which is exciting, right?

“We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics,” Warren said in his opening remarks. Huh? Wait a minute. So, in other words, the institution of the state should not be linked to the church, but those who run the state should believe in the teachings of the church? Furthermore, when this guy says “faith,” he doesn’t mean Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t even mean Judaism. What Warren means is that his Christian church has enough members to bully into submission those of us who live by the indisputable facts of science rather than fairy tales. But, that is another argument, and this is supposed to be a “civil forum.”

First up was Obama, who is, most importantly, going grey. He was nowhere near that silver-haired during the Team Democrats debates. Obviously, the stress is getting to him. And like McCain, he is not wearing a tie. Party on dudes.

So, although the two contestants took their questions separately, let’s compare some of the contrasting answers, head to head.

“Who are the three wisest people you know in your life?” Warren asked.

Obama gave us his wife and grandmother, and then hedged with a laundry list of characters from the Team Democrats pantheon — not a particularly inspiring answer, but an honest one.

And McCain? First, he gave us Gen. David Petraeus, the leader of our forces in Iraq, and then talked about the guy so much that he revealed an obvious boy crush. Then he mentioned John Lewis, who was badly injured in a confrontation during the civil rights movement. And, finally, eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

Could this guy be any more rehearsed? You could almost see campaign manager Steve Schmidt’s fingers pulling the strings above his head. First, he went for Iraq to show his military experience. Second, he chose an African-American leader to show he likes the blacks too. And finally, he went for the double-whammy of praising a woman while demonstrating that he is down with the kids on “the Internets.” Putz.

“What would be the greatest moral failure in your life?” Warren asked.

This question produced two of the most honest answers of the night. Said Obama: “I experimented with drugs.” Said McCain: “The failure of my first marriage.” The interesting thing here, though, is that Team Democrats will probably give McCain a pass for the marriage thing, but Team Republicans are very unlikely to let the drugs issue go by. Score one for McCain.

“And, what would be the greatest moral failure of America?” Warren asked.

“In my lifetime,” Obama said, the failure “has been that we still don’t abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me,” cleverly alluding to the verse that the new evangelical political action committee supporting Obama has taken as its name: the Matthew 25 Network.

“I think after 9/11, my friends,” McCain said, “instead of telling people to go shopping or take a trip, we should have told Americans to join the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, the military, expand our volunteers.” Here, McCain was attempting to separate himself from the Bush administration and play up his increasingly laughable “maverick” image.

“At what point does a baby get human rights?” Warren asked.

This was a loaded question: The first question should have been, when is a baby actually a baby? When it’s a zygote? An embryo? A fetus? When it can survive outside of the womb? When it is born? This is such a minefield that it may derive an answer like, “Whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.” Which is what Obama thoughtfully said. On the other hand, McCain was incredibly sure of himself with the Christian-crowd pleasing: “At the moment of conception.” Hmmm. MMTP producers have a question for those who agree with McCain: If a zygote has human rights and grows up to be a woman, why would the federal government then have the right to seize sovereignty of her body and revoke her human rights to manage her own reproduction? Or a better question: “Are you still beating your wife?”

“Does evil exist, and if so, should we ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it, or defeat it?” Warren asked.

When a preacher-type speaks of evil, he is referring to an actual force, some outside protagonist that makes one do bad things, such as the devil or Darth Vader. Or Dora the Explorer. For example, megachurch preacher Ted Haggard spoke of “a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life,” after being caught soliciting drugs and banging male hookers.

“Defeat it,” said McCain, nearly foaming from the mouth. “If I’m president of the United States, my friends, if I have to follow him to the gates of hell, I will get bin Laden and bring him to justice.”

Gates of hell? Is he nuts? And, the thing is that he loves saying that stuff. Just look at his face — he seems so proud of himself. Weirdo.

“We see evil all the time,” Obama said, taking a less frenzied position. “We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children. I think it has to be confronted.” Fair enough.

“Why do you want to be president?” Warren asked.

“I feel like that American dream is slipping away,” Obama said. “I think we are at a critical juncture. I think I have the ability to build bridges across partisan lines, racial [and] regional lines to get people to work on some common-sense solutions to critical issues, and I hope that I have the opportunity to do that.”

Apparently, McCain has been studying Obama’s MySpace profile.

“I want to inspire a generation of Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interests,” was McCain’s answer. “I have a record of reaching across the aisle and working with the other party, and I want to do that, and I believe, as I said, that Americans feel it is time for us to put our country first.”

Tune in next week to see which one of these megachurch-attending megalomaniacs will be reaching across the aisle of Air Force One to steal one of those really small packets of peanuts.

Hail to the Chief!