Showdown at Saddleback By William Kristol, New York Times

August 18, 2008

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While normal people were out having fun Saturday night, I was home in front of the TV. But I wasn't enjoying the Olympics. Your diligent columnist was dutifully watching Barack Obama and John McCain answer the Rev. Rick Warren's questions at Saddleback Church. Virtue is sometimes rewarded. The event was worth watching -- and for me yielded three conclusions.

First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates.
Warren's queries were simple but probing. He was fair to both candidates, his manner was relaxed but serious, and he neither went for "gotcha" questions nor pulled his punches. And his procedure of asking virtually identical questions to each candidate during his turn on stage paid off. It allowed us to see the two giving revealingly different answers to the same question.

So, I say, with all due respect to Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw and Bob Schieffer -- the somewhat nondiverse group selected by the debates commission as the three presidential debate moderators -- one of them should step aside for Warren.

Second, it was McCain's night.

Obama made no big mistakes. But his tendency to somewhat windy generalities meant he wasn't particularly compelling. McCain, who went second, was crisp by contrast, and his anecdotes colorful.

Now I'm not entirely unbiased (!), so I don't quite trust my initial judgment in such matters. But it was confirmed the next morning. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reported on "Meet the Press" that "the Obama people must feel that he didn't do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. ... What they're putting out privately is that McCain ... may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama."

There's no evidence that McCain had any such advantage. But the fact that Obama's people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.

Third, Obama and McCain really do have different "worldviews," to use Rick Warren's term.

Perhaps the most revealing moment was the two candidates' response to a question about evil. Yes, evil -- that negation of the good that, Friedrich Nietzsche to the contrary notwithstanding, we seem not to have moved beyond.

Warren asked whether evil exists and if it does, "do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?"

Obama and McCain agreed evil exists and couldn't be ignored. But then their answers diverged.

Obama said that "we see evil all the time" -- in Darfur, on the streets of our cities, in child abusers. Such evils, he continued, need to be "confronted squarely." And while we can't "erase evil from the world," we can be "soldiers" in the task of confronting it when we see it.

But, Obama added, "Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility" as we confront evil. Why? Because "a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil." After all, "just because we think our intentions are good doesn't always mean that we're going to be doing good."
[ ... ]

John McCain appears to think so. Unlike Obama, he took the question about evil to be in the first instance about 9/11. McCain asserted that "of course evil must be defeated," and he put "radical Islamic extremism," Al Qaeda in particular, at the top of his to-defeat list. In this context, McCain discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and concluded by mentioning "the young men and women who are serving this nation in uniform."

So while Obama talked of confronting evil, McCain spoke of defeating it. Obama took the view that evil is generally abroad in the world; McCain focused on radical Islam and 9/11. Obama claimed that all of us must be metaphorical "soldiers" against evil; McCain paid tribute to actual American soldiers. And McCain couldn't resist saying again Saturday night that if he has to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell to get him and bring him to justice, he'll do so.

Rick Warren remarked Saturday night that he wanted to help us understand Obama's and McCain's different worldviews. He accomplished his purpose.