Obama's Faith Tour

One of the lesser known but fairly important activity that the national media tends to overlook these days is how aggressively the Obama campaign has been using surrogates and peer-to-peer canvassing to convince ...well, working class whites that Obama isn't some unknown force but instead is a guy who is like them...enough like then anyway, and shares their values.

CBN News gets exclusive word of a major surrogate effort that'll launch next week. The Obama campaign calls it their Faith, Family and Values Tour, with the slogan: "Voting ALL Our values."

The Brody File is told that top faith surrogates will hit the trail for Obama. Some of those high profile figures include Former Indiana Congressman and pro-life Democrat Tim Roemer, Catholic legal scholar Doug Kmiec, and author Donald Miller. You can also expect a soon to be named Evangelical North Carolina (red state) Congressman to travel the country as well. All of these surrogates are well versed and comfortable talking faith and politics. This is clearly a sign by the Obama campaign that they plan to target red state and swing state moderates.

The key here is targeting. This isn't an effort to corral single-issue evangeliclals, who, even before the choice of Palin, weren't going to vote for Obama. Instead, the tour will hit cities and towns and neighborhoods with a massive of moderate mainline protestants and modernist Catholics. The campaign has crunched a lot of data and knows, for example, where to go in a state like Indiana to find moderate to conservative Methodists, and where to not to waste their time (i.e., courting Southern Baptists.)

The Obama campaign takes heart at public polling showing that Obama is running strongly among white Catholics and well among just about every identifiable religious group -- outisde of conservative evangelicals.