After Dobson’s comments made headlines — only because his media operation leaked the text of the radio show to the Associated Press the day before it aired — an advertisement defending Obama appeared on Colorado Christian radio stations. “With all these stones being cast at Sen. Obama, it can be hard to know what to believe,” a woman’s voice gently intoned while a piano tinkled in the background. “But in Luke, Jesus taught us that we must listen to what a man says, because out of the overflow of his heart, his mouth speaks.” The ad then played a clip from the speech that so riled Dobson, in which Obama laid out how his salvation at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ informed his politics.

Speaking on behalf of Obama’s heart was the Matthew 25 Network, a new political action committee launched by Democratic operative Mara Vanderslice, who served as John Kerry’s religious outreach coordinator. The PAC, not affiliated with the Obama campaign, is named for the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus is said to have told his followers to feed the hungry and clothe the naked: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, my brethren, you did for me.”

Matthew 25 aspires to advance “a better Christian witness in politics” and challenge the dominance of conservative evangelicalism in swing states like Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and perhaps even the Bible Belt strongholds of North Carolina and Georgia. Deploying a rapid response on Christian radio to vouch for Obama’s faith, to defend him with what Vanderslice calls “an authentic Christian voice,” will be the PAC’s principal focus. “We’re going to have our hands full with smears,” she says, and combating them on English- and Spanish-language Christian radio “will be our niche.” More recently, Matthew 25 condemned a John McCain campaign ad that appeared to suggest that Obama was the antichrist.

Matthew 25 has emerged out of the belief among evangelical Democrats that the Democratic Party needs to get religion to win. In 2005, led by Pentecostal minister Leah Daughtry, then chief of staff to the Democratic National Committee, the party initiated a “Faith in Action” agenda, intended to reach out to religious voters concerned about poverty, the environment and healthcare. Daughtry is now chairwoman of the Democratic National Convention, and for the first time, the convention, beginning Aug. 26 in Denver, will open with an interfaith gathering and include a People of Faith Caucus, which will meet throughout the week to hear faith leaders discuss how to mobilize voters.

The Obama campaign is engaged in its own religious outreach, with the candidate meeting with 30 high-profile religious leaders in early June, proposing his own version of Bush’s faith-based initiative, and employing a religious outreach team. The campaign sends out a weekly “American Values Report” highlighting statements by Obama, profiles of religious supporters and blog responses to a weekly “values question,” such as, “How do you gauge a candidate’s character?” Soon the campaign will launch an initiative aimed at reaching out to younger evangelicals through house parties and other events. And on Saturday, Obama will appear with John McCain at a forum held by the Rev. Rick Warren at his megachurch, Saddleback, in California.

Fashioning a halo around Obama may be a wise political move, but not all religious activists, not to mention their secular allies, are sold on it. They see the strategy as pandering and question whether the candidate should be compelled to prove his religious credibility at all. Daniel Schultz, a United Church of Christ minister, the proprietor of the Daily Kos spinoff Street Prophets and an Obama supporter, recently fired off a post, “Matthew 25 Goes Full-On Obama’s Jesus Juice,” asking, “Do we really need a presidential campaign based on out-Jesusing the other side?”

Vanderslice, Matthew 25′s driving force, has been at the center of the Democratic Party’s stepped-up religious rhetoric since the 2004 election. She says her advice that Kerry talk about his faith and reach out to religious audiences was ignored, causing him to relinquish a significant voting bloc to Bush. (A senior Kerry campaign staffer disputes her account, calling it “rewritten history.” The staffer says that Kerry, a religious person, did talk about his faith and meet with religious leaders, particularly Catholic leaders, during his presidential campaign.)

While Vanderslice claims to have been thwarted in the Kerry campaign, she believes she will be more effective in her support of Obama, who thrilled her with the words, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states,” in his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. She has rallied support for Matthew 25 from a host of influential religious figures and politicians. They include Vicki Kennedy, the Catholic wife of the iconic senator from Massachusetts; Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the House majority whip; centrist and evangelical Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark.; and Brian McLaren, leader in the “emerging” church movement, whose books have influenced Obama’s director of religious affairs, Joshua DuBois.

Vanderslice is no doubt aware of polls that show that more than half of white evangelicals — Christians who claim to have had a “born again” experience and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as their savior — are soundly conservative, and probably out of reach for Obama. So with a $500,000 budget, she has set Matthew 25′s sights on the roughly 30 percent of evangelicals who are centrist or moderate. She believes Matthew 25 can win them over by stressing Obama’s stance on ending the war in Iraq and helping the poor and vulnerable, at home and abroad. Those are the kinds of Christian values that appeal to moderates, she attests, rather than the religious right’s fixation with opposing gay rights and abortion.

Matthew 25′s mission may not depend entirely on a miracle. A recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that McCain’s support among white evangelicals has slipped 8 points below what George W. Bush enjoyed at the same time in 2004, although, to date, Obama has not picked up that support, as those voters remain in the undecided camp. A more recent Time magazine poll found that 70 percent of white evangelical likely voters plan to vote for McCain, roughly the same number who voted for Bush in 2000, with 7 percent undecided.

John Green, senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum, sees an opening. “My reading of the surveys suggests there is a real opportunity for Obama and his allies in Matthew 25″ to move enough evangelical, mainline Protestant and Catholic voters to the Democratic column to spell victory in November. Obama would not have to win a majority of evangelicals, Green says. Even a 10 to 15 percent gain over Kerry’s 22 percent showing among evangelicals could make a difference, particularly in Colorado, Virginia and the Midwestern swing states, where evangelicals are less conservative than their Southern counterparts.

Matthew 25 plans to tap new voters by highlighting the support of evangelical leaders, who challenge both the religious right’s orthodoxy and its claim to represent all evangelicals. McLaren, author, most recently, of “Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis and a Revolution of Hope,” is a preeminent figure in the emerging church movement, which eschews everything typically associated with church: a building, a pastor with authority, a not-to-be questioned text. Instead, going to church can involve meeting around a pool table or in a living room, and having a dialogue rather than a sermon.

In a letter posted on the PAC’s Web site, McLaren states, “We’ve watched too many members of our faith communities be manipulated by cynical politicians who knew what tune to play to get people of faith marching obediently in their parade.” McLaren adds that Christians may not be in agreement with every detail of Obama’s campaign, but says “we’re electing a president, not a Messiah.”

“The idea of Matthew 25 is to say, as people of Christian faith — and Jewish people and Muslims — our faith motivates us to be concerned about the other, not just us,” McLaren says. “Our faith makes us be concerned about those who are most vulnerable. Our vote is going to be oriented not just toward self-interest, but toward the common good.”

Tom Sheridan, a Catholic and a well-connected lobbyist for HIV/AIDS and antipoverty causes, who was one of Matthew 25′s early organizers, says he would like to see Obama lay out a plan for his first 100 days based on the “corporal works of mercy,” the cornerstone of Catholic social justice teaching. The Republican Party, says Sheridan, “would label me a tax-and-spend liberal. But if a candidate said I would like to see us all called to corporate works of mercy, and my policy will address those things, suddenly people who would have never listened to you before will be listening.”

But Schultz, the United Church of Christ minister, objects to the kind of evangelical language that Matthew 25 uses in its advertising. “If evangelicals are the dominant voice, where does that leave the mainline perspective? Or Jews, or anyone? The question my secular friends would have about that is, ‘So do I have to pledge eternal faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior if I want to run for president?’”

Ronald Lindsay, executive director of the Center for Inquiry’s Council for Secular Humanism, is also bothered by the holy-rolling rhetoric. “When you equate religion with values, it reinforces the public perception, which is clearly erroneous, that to be a good person, you have to believe in God,” he says.

Matthew 25′s Web site juxtaposes a photograph of a beatific Obama with Jesus’ words from Matthew. David Gushee, a prominent evangelical and a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta, questions the wisdom of placing a biblical imprimatur on a candidate. “The problem is appropriating a biblical theme and saying this is why we should support one candidate or another,” he says. “I don’t go there, I don’t cross that line. I prefer to be clear about what our values are, and to say to all candidates, we challenge you to meet our values.”

For Gushee, those values include the candidate’s positions on torture (Gushee heads a group of religious and secular leaders opposed to the Bush administration’s use of torture), war, the environment and poverty. He points out that some evangelicals are likely to be attracted to Obama because of his stances on social justice issues or health are; still others might be drawn to him “because of the evidence this person has thought deeply about religion in public life.”

For Obama to make inroads with religious voters not traditionally inclined to the Democratic Party, he must overcome one major obstacle: abortion. While Obama supports reproductive rights, Matthew 25, along with other religious activists, aims to shift public discourse away from a showdown over Roe v. Wade (or “criminalization,” as Vanderslice puts it) and toward “abortion reduction.” Abortion reduction aims to decrease the number of abortions by reducing the number of unintended pregnancies. It also asserts it can increase the number of pregnancies carried to term by improving women’s economic standing and promoting adoption.

Last week, abortion reduction language was written into the Democratic Party platform, an act hailed by its evangelical advocates. The Rev. Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, an evangelical antipoverty advocacy group, called it a “significant step forward.” Joel Hunter, a Florida megachurch pastor and registered Republican, declared that “pro-lifers of both parties can now support Senator Obama.” Clinton family advisor Rev. Tony Campolo, a member of the party’s platform-writing committee, said that religious antiabortion voters are now “waiting to hear from Barack Obama that he sees this as a moral issue and issue of conscience.”

Although pro-choice advocates, who also champion reducing the need for abortion, were pleased with the platform language, the term “abortion reduction,” and some of the elements of legislative proposals, rankle longtime reproductive rights advocates such as Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for a Free Choice, who are supporting Obama. And Schultz isn’t buying the fact that the strategy will sway evangelical voters. Abortion “is perhaps the most polarizing issue in contemporary politics,” he recently wrote on Street Prophets. “The pro-life vote isn’t going to be won over by hazy talk about ‘abortion reduction.’”

For now, pollsters say it’s too soon to tell whether the new religious face of Democratic politicking will lead to the White House. James Penning, professor of political science at Calvin College, and coauthor of the college’s National Survey on Religion and Public Life, says Obama does have “the potential to pick up votes at the margins,” particularly of moderate evangelicals. As for Matthew 25, he says, “until it convinces a large number of people that it’s in for the long haul, and not based on crass partisan politics, it will have a difficult time” attracting support beyond its base of Christians already aligned with the Democratic Party. Green, the Pew religious scholar, agrees. While the opportunity is there, he says, “we just don’t know how big that opportunity is.”

So Wallace, following a 92nd Street Y panel last night, said this:

“There will be pressure to elevate a woman but there will be an equal amount of pressure to pick someone who is prepared,” Wallace said.

And then she said this:

Wallace flagged one female official in particular who she thinks would be a good choice this year.

“Nikki Haley — she’s great,” she said. “She’s the most effective surrogate Romney has.”

If the Sarah Palin problem was a problem of preparation and vetting, Haley … might present some issues? Specifically an odd and mostly unsubstantiated sex scandal and also these rumors that she might at any moment be indicted on tax charges. The tax thing might be bullshit and the affair story was the product of a self-promoting creep but they’re “out there,” as they say.

More important, Haley has been governor of South Carolina since January of 2011. As in very slightly longer than one year. And slightly less time being a governor than Sarah Palin had in 2008. It’s almost as if Wallace is making a pick not based on the principle of Who Would Be Best For the Nation but on demographics and optics?

Wallace also apparently suggested Carly Fiorina, which, lol. Romney/Ex-CEO who famously received a giant golden parachute when she was forced out of her company 2012, everyone! Just the ticket for the new economy.

That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it’s unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well — remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it’s to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could’ve dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.

Instead, McCain has won the nomination three-and-a-half minutes into the film. Soon we’re watching Julianne Moore watch Tina Fey on TV. You remember the “SNL” sketches making fun of Palin, right? In case you don’t, “Game Change” airs lengthy chunks from most of them. It also has tons of actual footage from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, and it re-creates debates and speeches and the Couric interview and the Charlie Gibson interview and a bunch of other things you saw either live or on YouTube when they happened.

Moore’s performance is not just fair but maybe even flattering. (For one thing, she doesn’t hit those flat upper Midwest vowels as gratingly as the real Palin.) Woody Harrelson plays strategist Steve Schmidt — the film’s protagonist — as a grizzled, “too old for this shit” campaign veteran called back to the trail against his better judgment. Jamey Sheridan is given barely anything to do as Mark Salter, McCain’s “conscience.” Salter, the primary author of his “Maverick” mythos, is limited, after the Palin selection, to making a hilariously over-telegraphed face of concern as everyone else in the war room applauds her first speech.

But the film is about Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace because they were pretty clearly Halperin and Heilemann’s primary sources, and we watch them become horrified by the depths of Sarah Palin’s ignorance at exactly the same time as everyone else in America became horrified by her ignorance.

Because it’s Hollywood, there’s very little politics in the film’s depiction of politics. Policies are simply things for Sarah Palin to write on note cards and not memorize. Operatives confidently declare, in faux Sorkin-ese patter, that if this or that meaningless decision is made, it means “we’ll lose by five.”

There is a sheen of faux cynicism (McCain swears like a sailor!) but it masks complete naiveté: Everyone is basically honorable and decent. Nicolle Wallace — a member of the Bush administration communications team — is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of someone as dangerously ignorant as Sarah Palin in the White House. On election night, she breaks down in tears as she admits to Schmidt that … she didn’t vote. They embrace.

The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to “unfair” — Sarah Palin doesn’t know that the head of Great Britain’s government is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It’s an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to “the base” because of Palin’s heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn — “if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!” — after “winning” her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention. (Todd Palin barely does anything.)

The constant use of actual news footage adds a bit of verisimilitude but also constantly raises the question of why this lightly fictionalized version of the election actually needs to exist. “Game Change” is not really for serious political junkies, who remember all the stuff that did happen and will scoff at the stuff that didn’t. (At one point, John McCain answers his ringing iPhone in the middle of the night. He used a BlackBerry, HBO.) But if casually politically involved people want to see their assumptions about Sarah Palin reinforced, well, there are still those “SNL” sketches.

In the end, the Republican operatives who foisted Sarah Palin on an unprepared nation are rightly horrified that they created a monster, but at no point does anyone act concerned that their actual candidate was himself an angry, warmongering old crank with extremely fungible principles. Sure, Sarah Palin didn’t know what the Fed did. Do we have any proof John McCain knew what it should’ve done? Maybe everyone actually was totally unfair to poor Sarah Palin.

Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush’s first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything “political” in years. But Curl has been hearing things!

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Oh, a month-long tour in support of her book about her time in the Bush administration! She must be running for vice president, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan and George W. Bush.

There’s more. (And not just the part where Curl calls Rice “a spicy Rice dish” and waxes fetishistic about “her guns” being “a match for those of our first lady Michelle Obama.”)

Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.

Curl has so many inside scoops packed into this column! I had no idea that our first presidential running mate swap since Ford’s 1976 campaign was basically a foregone conclusion and not just a weird Beltway journalist fantasy! But yes, I can see why the still  un-chosen GOP candidate would definitely be looking pretty closely at Rice — who’s been strongly making the case for her selection by not explicitly denying interest in the position — in case Obama replaces Biden with Clinton, which he will surely do.

The column gets worse (“Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an ‘American black’”) but that’s not really important. What’s important is exploring how someone like Condoleezza Rice ends up a perennial name on the fantasy ticket list.

Rice has been a subject of these columns since 2005, when she became Bush’s second secretary of state, and the White House tasked communications operative Jim Wilkinson — previously known best for inventing the false story of Jessica Lynch* — with getting Rice (and her boss) some much-needed positive press. Wilkinson did his job beautifully (remember when Rice’s knee-high boots were a topic of actual serious news coverage for weeks?) and Rice began receiving the “rock star” treatment.

In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, author of the 2007 Rice bio “The Confidante,” summarized the exact moment of the birth of the presidential speculation:

In March 2005, before Rice sat for an interview with the Washington Times, Wilkinson slipped a note to the editorial page editor, Tony Blankley, suggesting that she be asked whether she would consider running for president. It was an audacious proposal — she had been secretary for only six weeks — but such speculation would bolster Rice’s image as a leader. (Wilkinson and Blankley said they do not recall the incident, but others present said they saw Wilkinson’s note.)

Oh, the Washington Times.

Shortly thereafter, Dick Morris wrote a book claiming — nay, insisting — that 2008 would be “Condi vs. Hillary.”

As Iraq descended into a violent civil war in 2006, Rice-for-president buzz bizarrely grew. There was enough of a false grass-roots movement for a paint-by-numbers AP trend piece with a silly nickname and everything. Tim Russert asked her point blank. As always, she said no in no uncertain terms.

Then, of course, everyone began to speculate that she’d be McCain’s running mate. Robert Novak claimed as much on Fox. Dan Senor said she was pushing for the pick on some Sunday show. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a Talk of the Town piece on the subject! McCain and Rice both finally denied “reports” that she was angling for the spot on the ticket.

Now, I guess, it’s time to start up the rumor mill anew.

But before you put pen to paper on that column about how a Gingrich-Rice ticket would surely win moderate women in Ohio, consider this: In addition to the fact that she’s always denied wanting the job, and in addition to the fact that she was an unmitigated failure in the Bush administration, downplaying terrorism as a priority prior to 9/11 and selling the public on the Iraq invasion with untruths, Condi Rice is pro-choice.

*Update: Jon Krakauer recently rescinded his claim that Wilkinson, then a communications aide to General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the initial false Washington Post report on Lynch’s apparent heroics before her capture. Though Wilkinson was obviously involved in the PR campaign surrounding Lynch’s rescue and return to the U.S., he apparently isn’t responsible for falsifying her actions or leaking that false story to the press.

The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.

(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)

Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:

This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.

If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)

Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.

A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!

Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.

Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?

How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.

I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.