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Steven Waldman

Mark Silk asks: “If Sarah Palin left the church where she was baptized when she ran for statewide office lest people think her a Holy Roller while Barack Obama stayed at the church where he was baptized despite the risk of being considered a black liberationist until his presidential campaign was almost overwhelmed by it,…

McCain backers have said McCain chose Sarah Palin because she’s so much like him. Most important, she seems to have taken on the Republican establishment. But in other ways she represents everything he hates. A few weeks ago, former senator Rick Santorum said that when they served in the Senate together McCain “would often rail…

Virtually nothing can come out that will dissuade evangelicals from adoring Sarah Palin. No, I’m not accusing them of being ingorant or “easily led.” But the dynamics of how this is playing out make it extremely unlikely they’ll fallout of love with her, even in the face of evidence that sh’es not actually a reformer.…

Those on the left, or merely those who aren’t evangelical Christians, are struggling to make sense of the religious life of Sarah Palin. To many, she seems a frightening harbinger of a fundamentalist takeover. Saturday’s New York Times piece about Palin’s deep faith and Bible-focused church will be chewed over for evidence of her extremism.…

The Obama campaign had been arguing that the candidate was charting a third-way approach to abortion: supporting abortion rights but promoting policies that would reduce the number of abortions. Pro-life liberals were therefore deeply disappointed to hear that after the Palin announcement, the Democrats started running a radio ad about abortion that made no mention…

“While we grow our supplies, we must also reduce our demand — not by changing our lifestyles but by putting the free market to work and taking advantage of technological breakthroughs.” –2008 Republican platform

The moderate evangelical vote is slipping away from Barack Obama. All year, Sen. Obama has worked hard to win evangelical voters. They’ve run campaign ads, distributed literature about being a “committed Christian,” and offered numerous outreach events at the Democratic convention. At stake are about six million voters – moderate evangelicals who voted for George…

I may be the only person in the country who thought John McCain’s speech was much better than Sarah Palin’s or any other speeches this week. He explained plausibly how his POW experiences led him to be an independent spirit. He seemed sincere when he said, “I was blessed by my misfortunes.” When he said,…

The McCain film suceeded in humanizing Cindy tremendously. I really had no idea she had a humanitarian streak. One surprising bit: they went on quite some time about the “love at first sight” between John and Cindy. Since McCain was married at the time, I honestly thought they’d skip past that detail. Prior to Sarah…

Since Obama and Biden saluted John McCain’s service, I’ve been surprised that the Republicans haven’t acknowledged or even celebrated the basic historic nature of Obama’s nomination as the first African-American. It was an easy way to look generous without fundamentally undermining their basic argument. But Palin definitely didn’t, and other Republican speakers have actually mocked…
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