The numbers aren’t in yet for last night’s forum at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church though I suspect a good many more Americans watched Michael Phelps make history by winning his eighth gold medal. And in retrospect, I wish I had joined them. As is, I am ensconced in a primitive lake house in Connecticut, with basic cable and no Tivo, and had to choose between the wonks and the winners. Which doesn’t make me a loser, necessarily… 

Or the Dems, I trust. It is good, always, to know your enemy and if you get most of your political news from skewed sources like Countdown with Keith Olbermann, you might think McCain was a befuddled old man and then Obama would use him like a punching bag in a debate. But this was no debate: the candidates answered Warren’s questions separately, Obama first, before members of his congregation and the media and only stood on stage together for a moment. And McCain has found his legs doing town-hall debates to much smaller audiences than Obama’s, and from the reaction he got from the crowd I would say he may have found his following. 

Observers keep saying that the evangelical voters are up for grabs this year, with many of them more concerned about global warming and international poverty than the old saws of abortion and gays. But the whoops McCain got for adamantly opposing a woman’s right to choose and making it clear he would pack the Supreme Court with others who felt the same was enough to make your blood run cold. Or mine, anyway. 

Of course, most Americans do think women should be able to decide what to do with their bodies (which is big of them) and despite the 25 million copies of Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life, in print, his flock is but a slice of the electorate. But it is one that arguably Obama needs a piece of, and as comfortable as he was talking the Bible talk (quoting Matthew, touting humility) the red meat was clearly being served by Johnny Mac. 

All we can hope is that Obama, who treated his half of the show as a conversation with the pastor while McCain leapfrogged past the dais to speak directly to the audience, gets better with personal narrative in such settings — and that Americans remain tired of the prospect of endless war. McCain tried his darndest to gin the crowd up over the Russian invasion of Georgia, reminding them of what spunky freedom-loving people the Georgians were — early Christians, too! But the response seemed relatively tepid. For neocons like McCain, seeing Russian tanks roll into other countries is like hearing “Free Bird” on the classic rock station. It’s supposed to make you hold your lighter up and and holler for more. But after seven years of pugnacity and a president who doesn’t do nuance, while the planet burns and our economy tanks, a lot of people’s arms are tired, their fingers scorched. Time for another tune. 

Political pundits, like nature, abhor a vacuum. How else explain the moaning and gnashing of teeth by writers on the left while the GOP-prone seem strangely confident in this August season of quietude, when the nation is preoccupied with the Olympics and enjoying the dregs of the summer?

I read several appalling pieces this week forecasting doom: John Heilemann’s think piece in New York magazine’s race issue, which basically says the only reason Obama is not surging in the polls is that we are, at heart, a nation of racists; and Michael Moore’s “How the Democrats Can Blow It” in the current Rolling Stone. (To call something by Moore self-serving is redundant: witness Number Six of his list of mistakes Obama is most likely to make: “Denounce Me!”)

Meanwhile, Republicans are feeling the hope, if not the love, again. Buoyed by those strangely static poll numbers, which scarcely moved after our man went to the Middle East and Europe, and may have actually moved in McCain’s direction as he began his own subliminally racist campaign against the Democrat and saw significant campaign contributions pour in. 

I would like to remind all watching that it’s early innings yet. The reason people don’t want to pay attention to the campaign now is that it seems endless (coming after the extended primary season, which seemed at times like one of those director’s-cut DVDs that feature all the scenes he should have kept out) and, for the most part, unenlightening. Tonight the first public meeting between the two candidates will be held significantly at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church and could feature some interesting questions from the purpose-driven-life guru, who told the Christian Broadcast Network he will be asking each man personal questions about his character and values.  

Okay, maybe you don’t think that sounds like must-see TV. It’s not a debate per se — Warren will quiz the candidates separately and expect them to make nice: Evangelicals are up for grabs in this election in a way they haven’t been for years, with the church-going (no matter what you thought of his old church) Obama looking a little better than the skirt-chasing, wife-dumping, war-loving admiral’s son. At least to some of us. But you would probably rather watch Michael Phelps win another gold medal, or other members of the American team whine about one more loss. That’s okay. As I said, it’s early innings. Things should start to get interesting right about now. 

Don’t worry! Do not redirect your browser, or reach for the remote. It’s the same old site (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) filled with the same old insights and conventional wisdom I’ve been dispensing for years. Time for a redesign is all, which I pulled off with the help of Cy Culpin at Faded Halo. (The largish photo of me was taken by my friend Diane Epstein when we were in Rome over Christmas. Hence the scarf, the shades, the attitude.) There’s some new stuff on the site — check out the first chapter of my novel in Fiction, new stories in Memoir and Journalism, and the introduction to the book I did with Josh Rushing, Mission: Al Jazeera, in Books. Feel free to take things down off the shelves but remember: You break it, you own it. 

As if one Sean Elder wasn’t quite enough, I got a message on my Facebook wall from another Sean Elder, in Scotland, reminding me that I was not alone, and that Elder was a Scottish name. Point taken, Sean. The so-called Scots-Irish of the US were so called to a) avoid being lumped in with the more Catholic Irish who later swarmed these shores and b) to let all comers know that we would be happy to drink with them but not necessarily to pick up the tab. 

He’s not the only one, by the way. I have been contacted by several Sean Elder’s on the internet over the years, and heard-tell of others (including one that had a small role in American Pie). One gets email from my students and kindly forwards it to me; another explained the origins of my grandfather’s name to me. The latest just asked me to join a group called We Are Sean Elder. The membership bar was fairly low. 

I suggested we all get together some day. I mean, Keith Kelly has his Kelly Gang (which raises money each year for some worthy cause) and my old agent, Ellen Levine, once had lunch with a bunch of other women with the same name, all in NY media. I don’t know what all I have in common with the other Sean Elders of the world but it would be fun to break bread with them. When the waiter came with the check we could say, “Sean Elder is getting this one.”

That’s the title of a great song by my old pal Steve Yerkey, about the night Hank Williams died. Legend has it Hank’s driver kept going even after the singer had OD’d in the back seat of the limo: he was too scared to stop, even as Hank finally achieved satori:

In a Pure filling station
On a New Year’s Day
In a car that needed gasoline
He found the only peace of mind
He would ever enjoy
In a place he’d never ever seen

(The Blasters had their own take on this evening, called “Long White Cadillac”. Compare and contrast.) I thought of Steve’s song after Hillary’s victory in West Virginia the other night. I had been flying across the country, watching the results on CNN, at least with one eye (the other was trained on an old David Lodge novel and the Pistons closing the door on the Magic). Except here Hillary is both dead star and driver, the engine of her own self-deception. She is trying to rally superdelegates in the party, essentially arguing at this point that a lot of working class white voters not only like her better, they’re a little bit racist to boot. But the hard-hearted Dems can’t seem to rally around a campaign whose motto could well be “White Like You.”

And then along comes John Edwards, stealing what little thunder she had from her win by finally endorsing Obama. What took him so long? The guy got seven percent of the vote in WV, just for being on the ballot; do you think Obama would have had quite the shellacking he did if Edwards had endorsed him sooner? If the vote had been a little less lopsided in that state, I guarantee that there would have been less tongue-wagging about his disconnect with white voters.

Not that I think there is anything wrong with Hillary raising the alarm. It’s clear that Obama is going to need every arrow in his quiver to defeat McCain, and paying attention to Hillary’s base is something he can start doing today. Wear the damn flag pin, shoot some pool, have yourself another hush puppy. While racism is alive and well in the hollows of WV (and south Boston, and Staten Island, and countless other communities across the country), I think the GOP is going to need more than “He’s black, and his church is scary!” to steal this election. (It’s going to be increasingly difficult to say his church is scary AND he is actually a Muslim; at some point Republicans will have to choose a line of attack and disinformation and stick with it.) The big news yesterday concerned the Dems big win in Mississippi. This was supposed to be the playbook for ’08: link candidate to Obama and Rev. Wright then sit back and watch him self-immolate. Except it didn’t work. The Democratic candidate, Travis Childers, won among the same kind of rural white voters who turned away from Obama in WV, good old boys (and gals) with one or two sheets in the closet. It was the Republicans’ third defeat in a special election this year, and they are now running for cover. But there’s no hiding place down here.

According to an article in Newsweek, Oprah Winfrey had been a member of Chicago’s Trinity United church until the mid-nineties — when she stopped attending services there, in part because of the inflammatory rhetoric of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “Winfrey was never that comfortable with the tone of Wright’s more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America’s favorite talk-show host,” writes Alison Samuels in the May 12 issue, and then quotes an old friend of Winfrey’s: “Oprah is a businesswoman first and foremost… She has always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn’t be smart.”

It’s interesting that long before Barack Obama knew he would be running for national office, Oprah already knew she was running for whatever weird sister-confessor role she has held for decades — and she knew she could never stop running. I still think Obama and his people were naive not to think that Wright would come back to haunt the candidate but his victory in North Carolina and near victory in Indiana would seem to indicate that this isn’t the controversy that’s going to sink him. Even Newt Gingrich warned Republicans that they were going to need something better than the scary pastor in the closet to beat the Democratic candidate in November. Willie Horton won’t spook no more.

I guess I should say presumptive Democratic nominee, since Hillary is now engaged on the last, and possibly strangest, phase of her campaign: the dance macabre. It reminds me of a Randy Newman song: she’s dead but she don’t know it. Or maybe she does, since every pundit and pollster pretty much pronounced her such after she failed to deal a mortal blow to Obama. But after weeks of having meat tenderizer poured on him because of his relationship to Wright, she is the one with the fork being put in her. Watch for her surrogates and winged monkeys to continue to talk up her historic candidacy and the importance of every vote but did you catch Bill’s expression while she was delivering her victory speech in Indiana? When he wasn’t smiling and clapping with the crowd he appeared to be hearing a song of his own, over the hill and very far away…

It must be hard to live your whole life as if you are running for something when you’re not sure what it is; Oprah wanted to be queen of America and damned if she isn’t. Hillary wanted to be president but it’s unlikely she’s going to get another shot. And after that, every other job title just sounds kind of weak. Maybe she can take up preaching.