WORLD NEWS A shifty performance from Barack Obama

It is not easy to imagine Gordon Brown and David Cameron, in the run-up to a not election, sitting down in a large church with a leading Protestant minister to discuss their religious beliefs. Yet that is exactly what Barack Obama and John McCain did last weekend. Both candidates, one after the other, were interviewed at length by the evangelical minister Rick Warren, described by Time magazine as "America's most powerful religious leader".
Of course, Watren's Civil Forum on Presidency was little more than a televised electoral "faith-off', a chance for both Obama and McCain to parade their moral clothing on the spiritual equivalent of a catwalk. Still, the very fact that both presidential wannabes, with just days to go before their respective party conventions, chose to be quizzed about God, good and evil is testament to the enduring power of Christianity in American public life.
Warren was hardly a daunting inquisitor, though. He is best known for his Hawaiian shirts, helping the poor, his goatee and selling 25 million copies of his book, The Purpose-Driven Life. For all his touchy-feeliness, the pastor did not shrink from difficult subjects. He used the same set of simple yet probing questions—What is your greatest moral failure? Is there such a thing as evil? This forced the candidates away from their campaign rhetoric and made them talk about their inner lives.
Obama, first up. treated the interview as an intellectual conversation. He quoted Scripture, and spoke to Warren directly. engaging with the audience without addressing them. McCain, by contrast, was more emotive and blunt. He looked about the crowd, repeatedly calling them "my friends". He relied on personal anecdote, explaining how prayer had helped him during his captivity in Hanoi. While Obama confessed to youthful "selfishness". McCain reached higher up the emotional scale. "My greatest moral failing," he said, "is the failure of my first marriage."
Pundits seem to agree that McC.ain's impassioned approach was more effective than his rival's cooler nuances. "As a general rule, visceral trumps cerebral," wrote Dick Polman in the Phitadelphia Inquirer. And on the essential issue of abortion, long ago exposed as Obama's weak point with Christian voters, the young senator sounded shifty. When Warren asked: "At what point does a baby get human rights?" Obama said the answer was "above my pay grade", which drew a disapproving murmur from the assembled faithful. McCain. faced with the same question, replied without hesitation: "At the moment of conception". and was rewarded with thunderous applause.
McCain's performance was not without fault, however. As a man who married into the Budweiser fortune, he was uncomfortable discussing the disparity of wealth in America. "Some of the richest people I have known in my life are the most unhappy," he said, before adding awkwardly: "I want everybody to get rich."
It was perhaps inevitable, though, that the media would consider the Civil Forum a success for McCain. White Protestant voters are so overwhelmingly Republican (70 per cent favour McCain, according to a recent survey) that campaign discussions on personal faith are invariably thought to put the Democratic candidate at a strong disadvantage.
Four years ago. however, 78 per cent supported President Bush, and with Obama holding a narrow lead in the overall polls such small margins might sway the real contest in November.