God-o-Meter can tell that Barack Obama is going to make it very difficult to keep its needle below ten. The Associated Press today sheds significant new light on Obama’s well-documented string of “faith forums” in early presidential primary and caucus states, including that his campaign is advertising the events in church bulletins and signing up “congregation contacts” to build support.
God-o-Meter remembers way back in 2004 when the Bush-Cheney campaign was lambasted even by some Christian Right leaders for using similar church organizing tactics. The AP reports that Obama is already drawing criticism from some quarters:

Obama has drawn criticism from the Rev. Welton Gaddy of the liberal Interfaith Alliance, who said the senator “has sounded precisely like George W. Bush” in recent church appearances.

And, like God-o-Meter has been saying for some time now:

“I don’t think a Democratic presidential candidate has come close to doing anything like this before,” said Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. “If you are going to parse the different dimensions of how a presidential candidate does religion, he’s doing them all.”

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