Saddleback Forum Round Up

By John Fea

Here are few of the early opinion pieces on Rick Warren's Saddleback Forum on the Presidency (See Darren Grem's post below for links to the transcript).

Mike Madden has a very informative piece at Salon

Michael Gerson and Sally Quinn at the Washington Post give the nod to John McCain.

Bill Kristol at the New York Times praises Rick Warren and suggests he should moderate the official presidential debates this fall.

Alan Wolfe at the New Republic also thinks the real winner Saturday night was Warren, while Noam Scheiber disagrees with pundits who proclaimed McCain the winner.

As expected, Beliefnet covers the Saddleback Forum from every possible angle.

And my own take at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

Comments

Anonymous said…
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/18/cafferty.mccain/index.html
rjc said…
The best commentary that I've seen came from Diane Winston on her USC blog, here:

http://uscmediareligion.org/?theScoop&scID=97

I didn't find the forum satisfying in the least, and I can't quite figure out why Warren is getting so much praise for his questions or his interviewing style. He could have, and should have, followed up a whole lot more. He promised that he wouldn't be letting the candidates get away with responses that didn't answer the hard questions, but that's exactly what he did. Very disappointing.
Robert Cornwall said…
In many ways the Forum allowed for a civil conversation -- except that in the end this was set up for McCain. Warren claims that an equal number of tickets were given for distribution to the two candidates. What he's not said publicly is that the majority of tickets went to church members (at a cost apparently). Unless southern OC has changed recently, this is highly GOP territory. Thus, it's highly likely that a conservative Southern Baptist congregation would root on McCain. Yes, McCain was the home team!

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