One more round on the Church thing--but perhaps from another angle. Pardon me if this thought has been posted before, but I haven't seen it.
As far as the Saddleback thing goes, couldn't Obama have pulled a Stephen Colbert/Press Club thing that night?
By that I mean, while McCain was speaking to the audience in front of him and ignoring the fact that the nation was watching, Obama was speaking to all of us.
I remember when Colbert's first reviews came out, everybody in the traditional media thought he had bombed. That's because they were taking their cues from the people in the room.
I also remember how much all of the netroots loved him, and I remember a comedian saying that every performer knows that there are times when you don't talk to your intended audience, you talk instead to the waiters standing in the back of the room. He said that's what Colbert was doing.
And sure enough, days and even weeks later, Colbert's performance was upgraded to brilliant. It is still remembered. It is memorable.
I think that by sticking to his guns on things like choice, Obama was "playing to the waiters" in that crowd. In this case, the waiters were all those pro-choice Republican women who were, by the very nature of patriarchal right wing religion, standing "in the back of the room" that night.
Already, this morning's Washington Post is trying to help McCain step back from his "unwavering" anti-abortion support, by saying that he might pick a pro-choice running mate:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
And already, a Republican woman has gone on Chris Matthews' Hardball saying that she is for Obama because of the appalling way that McCain has thrown pro-choice Republicans under the bus--and she especially referenced Saddleback.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
Now it's up to Obama--and to us, to solidify the victory, to make sure that we see his performance as memorable. We do this by saying Obama won in spite of advantages taken by silent coneheads or whatever. We do this by hammering McCain's unequivocal position against a woman's right to choose. We go on the offensive about Saddleback, we use it for our side.
So far, I'm not seeing that.
But Saddleback? McCain may have played to the crowd, but he may have also been rope-a-doped by Obama yet another time. How to make it so? It's up to us.