In the wake of the fascinating forum hosted by Pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., everyone is focusing on the contrasts between presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. More interesting are the contrasts between the intellectual-theologian Obama and the political Obama.

"Does evil exist?" Warren asked Obama. "And if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it, or do we defeat it?"

Obama the would-be moral philosopher replied, accurately, that evil is everywhere, in Darfur, in our streets, in our own hearts. We cannot "erase evil from the world. That is God's task. But we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront (evil) when we see it." (Imagine if President Bush called himself a soldier of God in the battle against evil.)

When asked what America's greatest moral failing was, theological Obama said it was our collective failure to "abide by that basic precept in (the Book of) Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me."

For Obama the politician, such scriptural quotations often serve as an all-inclusive writ to impose his religious views on others when it comes to fighting poverty, global warming, racism, etc. But when the question turns to abortion, political Obama insists on a policy of moral agnosticism and political laissez-faire. Asked directly when life begins as a legal matter, he punted, saying the answer was "above my pay grade."

Obama, commendably, told Warren that he wants to reduce the number of abortions. After all, he observed gravely, "we've had a president who is opposed to abortions over the last eight years, and abortions have not gone down." Unfortunately, Obama wasn't telling the truth. The abortion rate is the lowest it's been since 1974, partly because of pro-life policies under Bush, but also thanks to those implemented at the state level since the 1990s.

At Saddleback, Obama offered the ritualistic support for Roe v. Wade expected of all Democratic politicians, "not because I'm pro-abortion," but because women "wrestle with these things in profound ways."

This is surely true in many instances. But political Obama won't explain why "wrestling" with a serious moral question is an adequate substitute for deciding it correctly. People wrestle with all sorts of moral quandaries in "profound ways." Many slave owners wrestled with whether they should free their slaves, but that did not obviate the need for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Alas, when it comes to abortion, it's probably silly to expect anything but rote fealty to ideological pieties from a Democrat, just as it's naive to expect anything but the appropriate pro-life talking points from a Republican. But for a self-styled champion of nuance, political Obama's rigidity is spectacular to behold. Continued...