No, not ‘faster than light’, but rather ‘for the lose’. And while I will continue to support him (he hasn’t actually made any policy proposals yet), this is perhaps the worst political calculation of Barack Obama since the FISA vote, and doomed to fail as I will explain below.

I admit that I was intially and naively impressed with Rick Warren, believing that he was some sort of moderate who was trying to shift the focus of evangelicals away from the culture wars and towards more universal goals such as climate change and alleviating poverty. But after looking more closely at Warren’s ideology and the political initiatives he supports (most recently Prop 8), I have to conclude that Warren is little better than the Falwells and Robertsons – only with a much better PR machine to make him look like a moderate and much less ‘angry’. The video below pretty much sums everything up:

[youtube]Xz4O8j8MIhs[/youtube]

It’s pretty clear what Barack Obama is doing; evangelicals make up about 25% of the country (and supported McCain overwhelmingly), while gay people make up less than 10% (and supported Obama overwhelmingly). Thus it would make sense to try to gain votes with a larger section of the electorate… but then you would have to take into account Warren’s likening of abortion to the holocaust and being against stem cell research (60% of the country considers themselves ‘pro-choice’ and only 18% of the country believes that abortion right should be banned under all circumstances) and his right-wing foreign policy views. All three of these issues are central to the voting patterns of right-wing evangelicals, who are also notorious for being inflexible and exceedingly intolerant of dissenting opinions.

This is not even taking into account that we are dealing with a fundamental human rights issue (that Mr. Obama should be especially sensitive to, being an African-American…) and that if this were happening 40 years ago, Pastor Warren would be arguing for the separation of races based on biblical infallibility. If I were to try to woo the evangelical vote – not that I would even have to at this point after getting 7.5% more of the popular vote than John McCain and having a 68% popularity rating – I would get liberal evangelical Jim Wallis or former NAE president Richard Cizik to do the invocation, not some pseudo-moderate wolf in sheep’s clothing. That, and I would wait for the younger generation – who are generally more tolerant of alternative lifestyles – to take over the electorate.

Another possibility is that this could be just some sort of ploy where Obama tries to look more moderate while adopting left-wing policies (a reverse Rick Warren?); George W. Bush after all had left-wing Rev. Louis Leon during his 2005 invocation despite tacking hard to the right. But either way, it’s a bad day for the transition.