ABC's Dan Harris took to the airwaves once again to tout Barack Obama's “unprecedented” outreach to evangelicals. Harris reported a similar story on the June 22 broadcast of World News Sunday. The June 26 talking points on Good Morning America were similar to his Sunday story:
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Obama is more comfortable talking about “faith” than McCain.
Obama is planning rock concerts and house parties to woo young evangelicals.
Obama might be able to peel away “moderate” evangelicals which could swing a tight race.
Additionally, Harris introduced and labeled as “progressive” pastor Jim Wallis, a far-left evangelical who wants Obama to run on a promise of “abortion reduction.” Harris also took a dig at “conservative evangelical” Dr. James Dobson, who “attacked” Obama.
HARRIS: Seems like every day in this campaign, there's another faith-fueled headline. The latest, progressive pastor Jim Wallis encouraging Barack Obama to run on an abortion reduction platform.
WALLIS: If Barack Obama ran on a strong commitment to abortion reduction, it would show a lot of people, particularly people in the religious community, that he was taking this seriously as a moral issue.
HARRIS: This comes on the heels of an attack on Obama from conservative evangelical Dr. James Dobson.
DOBSON (audio clip): I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology.
Harris noted that Dobson's statement was in response to an Obama speech in which the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate compared Dobson to Reverend Al Sharpton and suggested the Sermon on the Mount would make it impossible for the Defense Department to do its job. Harris did not mention that Obama effectively called Dobson a liar when he said Dobson was “making stuff up.”
Unlike his Sunday story, Harris added that mixing faith and politics could prove dicey for Obama because of “pitfalls” in the form of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and radical Catholic priest Michael Pfleger, who embarrassed Obama by mocking Hillary Clinton in a sermon at Obama's former church. Harris couldn't resist mentioning John McCain's own “pastor problems.” McCain renounced the endorsements of evangelical preachers John Hagee and Rod Parsley because of some controversial comments they made. Neither man, however, was McCain's pastor or regularly preached at his church.
After the Harris story, GMA's Robin Roberts aired an exclusive and flattering interview with Pfleger which completely ignored his leftist ideology. For more analysis of that interview, read my colleague Scott Whitlock's Newsbusters blog.
Kristen Fyfe is senior writer at the Culture and Media Institute, a division of the
