After all the hubbub over The New Yorker’s cover featuring the Obamas, the magazine’s Condé Nast rival Vanity Fair has posted on its blog a version featuring John and Cindy McCain. The blog post reads:

“We had our own presidential campaign cover in the works, which explored a different facet of the Politics of Fear, but we shelved it when The New Yorker’s became the ‘It Girl’ of the blogosphere. Now, however, in a selfless act of solidarity with our downstairs neighbors here at the Condé Nast building, we’d like to share it with you. Confidentially, of course.”

And, of course, this isn’t an actual Vanity Fair cover; just one created so that people like me would post something about it.

Many found the Obama cover offensive, including both the Obama and McCain campaigns. Do you find the McCain one offensive, as well?

John McCain’s campaign wants your input in selecting the best song to go along with the mainstream media’s affection for Barack Obama. Here are your choices:

 Song No. 1

Song No. 2

As you may know, Obama recently announced that, if elected, he would revive Bush “faith-based” initiative, supporting religious organizations in their community work and involvement.  This was done surreptitiously (or not so much) to invite Christian voters from the right.  One problem with Obama’s faith-based revivification plan is that faith-based organizations would be forbidden to hire employees who do not have faith.  We might call it the Faith-or-Not-Faith-Based Initiative.  Lew Daly at Boston Review explains that this one weakness will ensure Obama’s plan would be as ineffectual as Bush’s.

By restricting religious hiring rights, Obama’s faith-based initiative attacks the very thing it claims to be supporting. That is, it attacks communities. The Supreme Court’s greatest advocate for the poor, Justice William Brennan, explained this better than anyone in his separate opinion in Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos (1987), the case that established the constitutionality of faith-based hiring rights […] For government to restrict the criteria and discretion that religious communities use to define and maintain their identities threatens the very existence of religion, as Justice Brennan (correctly) understood it.

It’s nice to be reminded that the Supreme Court believes such things, and bad to be reminded that a presidential candidate doesn’t.

In the third in a series of articles examining the presidential candidates’ positions on key campaign issues, WORLD political reporter Jamie Dean takes a look at John McCain and Barack Obama’s stance on faith-based initiatives. Jamie writes:

Both Obama and McCain say they support the concept behind the White House program that enables some religious organizations that offer social services to receive federal funds, and each candidate says he would continue the program as president.

But Obama’s recent proposal revealed a key difference in how the candidates would implement the policy: Obama said groups that accept federal funds shouldn’t be allowed to take religious beliefs into consideration when hiring employees. The senator’s aides say the regulations should extend to sexual orientation as well. …

McCain’s campaign says the senator disagrees with Obama’s departure from current policy, but McCain has offered few details about how he would manage faith-based initiatives as president.

Read Jamie’s entire analysis here.

Campaign Issues series:
McCain and Obama on abortion
McCain and Obama on the economy

Editor’s Note (July 23): In the print edition of WORLD, a portion of the final paragraph of Jamie’s faith-based initiatives article was accidentally left out. The article’s ending should read:

Towey wants to hear more about both candidates’ plans, and he says the hiring issue won’t go away. He notes that a slew of social-services programs are currently log-jammed in Congress because of disagreements over how to apply the current hiring rules for faith-based groups. Without more clarity, he says, “The poor become the losers because they are denied access to some very effective programs.”

The complete article can be found here.

There’s lots of speculation out there today on how well the media is dealing with the two presidential candidates.

First Associated Press television writer David Bauder raises the issue of fairness in the media coverage of the two campaigns, using the major TV news anchors pursuit of Barack Obama on his global tour as a prime example. Bauder even quotes Rush Limbaugh on the subject:

“My prediction is that the coverage of Obama on this trip will be oriented toward countering the notion he has no idea what he is talking about on foreign policy and defense issues and instead will prop him up as a qualified statesman. McCain, on the other hand, is a known quantity on these issues and his position does not excite nor fit the mainstream media’s narrative on Iraq and Afghanistan, so they simply ignore it and him.”

The other controversy revolves around The New York Times‘ refusal of a John McCain op-ed response to a recent Obama editorial on the Iraq War. In an email to the McCain campaign, Times Op-ed Editor David Shipley demanded a rewrite, saying that McCain would “have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory—with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan.” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds replied, “John McCain believes that victory in Iraq must be based on conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables. Unlike Barack Obama, that position will not change based on politics or the demands of The New York Times.”

Barack Obama and John McCain have agreed to appear together on August 16 and answer questions posed by pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Civil Forum on Leadership and Compassion. After the two candidates appear briefly together, they’ll separately field a hour’s worth of questions from Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life. Obama, who last spoke at Saddleback in 2006, won the coin toss and will go first.

Leah Daughtry is on a mission, and part of that mission is preaching barefoot.

[She] slipped off her stiletto-heel shoes at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, stepped from a pastor’s chair to the pulpit and shouted, “I am on the rise!” She wore a long black tunic with gold buttons that ran from her high collar almost to the carpet. Her graying hair was shorn tight to her dark brown scalp. She always preaches in bare feet in order to “de-self,” she had told me, and to let God’s spirit and words rush through her unimpeded. “I am on the rise!” she erupted again.

The other part of that mission is being chief of staff to Howard Dean and chief executive of the Democratic convention next month.  So the Times wants to know, “Can Leah Daughtry bring faith to the Democratic party?”  I wonder, too.  The answer may be in statements like these, from Daughtry’s own mouth:

The right of self-determination is the concern. If I do all the right things, I will live a full and abundant life - this should be true. But it’s not. Something’s wrong with the equation. Americans may not call this liberation theology, but they have the sense that things aren’t fair.

I’ll agree with Daughtry that things aren’t fair and that something’s wrong with the equation.  What’s wrong is sin.  Not oppression of one class or race over another.  It’s oppression of ourselves by our very own selves.  What Daughtry is talking about - well, that’s faith, but it ain’t Biblical.  That’s faith in man, not God.  Faith that “if I do all the right things, I will live a full and abundant life” is to make the self divine.  Perhaps this is what most people think Christianity is, I don’t know.  But life is unfair.  It will always be unfair. 

The lessons of Biblical faith would suggest that 1) nobody can do all the right things, and 2) having a full and abundant life comes from acknowledging #1, along with accepting on faith that God is who he says he is and that he has done and will do what he’s said he’s done and will do.  Oh, and the fact that “full” and “abundant” can only mean a life of full and abundant love and service.  Race might still be a problem in America, and in the world, and in human history, but it’s only a corollary to the Bigger Problem of sin and rebellion.  Can Leah Daughtry bring faith to the Democratic party?  Faith in something, but not God.  But perhaps that will be enough to give Obama a victory.

Earlier this year, evangelical leader Dr. James Dobson said he could not in good conscience vote for John McCain in the upcoming election. But now? “I never thought I would hear myself saying this,” Dobson says in a radio broadcast to air Monday. “… While I am not endorsing Senator John McCain, the possibility is there that I might.”

“There’s nothing dishonorable in a person rethinking his or her positions, especially in a constantly changing political context,” Dobson said in a statement to the AP. “Barack Obama contradicts and threatens everything I believe about the institution of the family and what is best for the nation. His radical positions on life, marriage and national security force me to reevaluate the candidacy of our only other choice, John McCain.”

Dobson’s “flip flop” is indicative of the “lesser-of-two-evils” quandary many evangelicals are debating this election year. And with poll numbers indicating an already close race, support from evangelicals like Dobson may give McCain the boost he needs come November.

Barack Obama is visiting Iraq today, marking the second major leg of his war zone tour that began in Afghanistan. Thus far, his trip has attracted widespread international coverage, which stands in stark contrast to the attention John McCain received on his recent and very similar trip.

The media fuss has left the McCain camp in a quandary, the International Herald Tribune reports. It says the Republicans seem unable to decide whether Obama’s visit to Iraq “is worthy of praise or an opportunity for payback for Obama’s unrelenting criticism of their own policy.” An AP headline sums up the surliness in the McCain camp at all the media attention Obama will get next week: McCain says he’s glad Obama is going to Iraq, sort of.

In an ABC News interview this morning, McCain–who had criticized Obama for developing his Iraq strategy without first revisiting the country–said he hopes Obama’s travels will give him an opportunity to see firsthand the success of the surge: “This is the same strategy that he voted against, railed against. He was wrong about the surge. It is succeeding and we are winning.” McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker didn’t mince words, however, when analyzing Obama’s travel plans: “Let’s drop the pretence that this is a fact-finding trip and call it what it is: the first-of-its-kind campaign rally overseas. It’s a giant photo opportunity.”

The Washington Post has crafted a devastating editorial on the “foolish consistency” of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

The real difference between the various plans is not the dates but the conditions: Both the Iraqis and Mr. McCain say the withdrawal would be linked to the ability of Iraqi forces to take over from U.S. troops, as they have begun to do. Mr. Obama’s strategy allows no such linkage — his logic is that a timetable unilaterally dictated from Washington is necessary to force Iraqis to take responsibility for the country.

Ouch. The Post concludes that Obama’s message “is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war’s outcome.” About time the MSM acknowledged that that has been the Democratic “strategy” all along.