Barack Obama has selected Rick Warren to give the Inaugural invocation--and a lot of folks ain't thrilled. Damon Linker isn't one of them. Writing on his new blog, he argues that Warren's a politically savvy pick. Key passage here:
But Obama's a politician, and the Warren pick is just the latest sign that he's an exceedingly shrewd one (as Andrew concedes). Warren is beloved by mainstream evangelicals, who have helped him to sell millions of books extolling a fairly anodyne form of American Protestantism. (Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell he is not.) It is in Obama's interest (and the Democrats') to peel as many moderate evangelicals away from the GOP as he can. Giving Warren such a prominent (but purely symbolic) place in the inauguration is a politically cost-free way of furthering this partisan agenda.