Obama's Plan to Target Evangelicals

Amanda Carpenter | June 09, 2008 11:45 AM

Barack Obama's presidential campaign has shared their plan, called Joshua Generation Project, to target young, evangelical voters with Christian Broadcast Network's David Brody.

Meanwhile, three major stories in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times published today detail John McCain's trouble connecting with evangelicals--a strong conservative base that propelled George Bush to victory in 2000 and 2004.

The offical roll-out of Joshua Generation won't begin for a few weeks, but campaign staffers point to Obama's Selma speech as their inspiration. The relevant passage is here:

"I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants. I thank the Moses generation; but we've got to remember, now, that Joshua still had a job to do. As great as Moses was, despite all that he did, leading a people out of bondage, he didn't cross over the river to see the Promised Land. God told him your job is done. You'll see it. You'll be at the mountain top and you can see what I've promised. What I've promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. You will see that I've fulfilled that promise but you won't go there. We're going to leave it to the Joshua generation to make sure it happens. There are still battles that need to be fought; some rivers that need to be crossed. Like Moses, the task was passed on to those who might not have been as deserving, might not have been as courageous, find themselves in front of the risks that their parents and grandparents and great grandparents had taken. That doesn't mean that they don't still have a burden to shoulder, that they don't have some responsibilities. The previous generation, the Moses generation, pointed the way. They took us 90% of the way there. We still got that 10% in order to cross over to the other side. So the question, I guess, that I have today is what's called of us in this Joshua generation? What do we do in order to fulfill that legacy; to fulfill the obligations and the debt that we owe to those who allowed us to be here today?"

Update: The conservative Home School Legal Defense Association has trademarked "Generation Joshua" and is threatening legal action against the Obama campaign's "Joshua Generation Project." HSLDA’s co-founder, chairman, general counsel, and former Mike Huckabee supporter Michael Farris told Roll Call (subscription required), "“It's impossible to miss this, as Web savvy as they are.” Farris added, "“If they're going to pick Biblical analogies, they should pick policies to correspond."

Farris is the author of “The Joshua Generation: Restoring the Heritage of Christian Leadership.”