God-o-Meter reported yesterday that Obama’s faith folks had backed out of a scheduled lunchtime debate in DC with opposite numbers on the McCain side. (Hey, wasn’t it the McCain side that was supposed to be suspending its campaign?) GOM quoted at length from a statement by the Family Research Council, which wanted everyone to know about this apparent act of bad faith by the Obamas. The scheduled moderator, Rev. Rob Schenck, was quoted as saying: “Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean assured me…that his party would do everything possible to constructively engage Evangelicals, traditional Catholics, and other moral conservatives… Barack Obama has made similar promises. They did a couple of high-profile media events, but it appears they were not serious at a grassroots level.”
The Obama campaign did not deny that it had backed out, and I’ve got no inside poop on why it did so. But Schenck’s a right-wing partisan and pro-life agitprop artist who has 1) sought to prove that Obama is a secret Muslim; and 2) called Obama’s Christian faith “woefully deficient.” Rick Warren was not quite the honest broker he held himself out to be at the Saddleback forum last month. If I’d been in the Obama camp, I wouldn’t have showed up for this debate either, not with Schenck in the chair.