Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were asked a number of tough questions at a recent event called the “Compassion Forum,” hosted by CNN’s Campbell Brown and Newsweek’s Jon Meacham. Meacham asked the candidates if life begins at conception. Here are their responses:

I think I have just read the best review yet of Senator Obama’s speech on race. It’s by Richard John Neuhaus and appears in First Things. He writes: “By reviving historic stereotypes, Senator Obama’s speech and the uses to which it is being put has dealt a severe blow to race relations in America. It is giving a big boost to what someone has rightly called the soft bigotry of low expectations. . .

Michael Gerson hits another homerun with his column in today’s Washington Post. He argues that Senator Barack Obama’s record on abortion is anything but moderate. Obama is a radical pro-choicer. Gerson writes: ‘Obama’s record on abortion is extreme. He opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion — a practice a fellow Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once called “too close to infanticide.” Obama strongly criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. In the Illinois state Senate, he opposed a bill similar to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which prevents the killing of infants mistakenly left alive by abortion. And now Obama has oddly claimed that he would not…

April fools! I confess. I used a little bit of misdirection in the survey that I posted yesterday. Yes, it was tricky. But it was an April Fool’s gag with a point. What was the trick? I began the post by discussing the fact that many people believe that President Bush lied about WMD in Iraq before the war. But in the last sentence of the fifth paragraph, I stopped using Bush’s name and substituted the generic appellation “the President of the United States.”

March 20 marked five years since the beginning of the war in Iraq, and yet many Americans still don’t understand it very well. Opinions seem to be driven more by partisan politics than by a balanced consideration of the issues. Since the beginning of the Iraq War, the public discourse about the conflict has become increasingly wearisome. For me, the revisionist histories of the run-up to the war have been particularly frustrating. The public’s general inability to recall more than a few nanoseconds of the historical record have given the revisions some staying power.

Michael Gerson has a fascinating Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post. He argues that Barack Obama’s record on the Iraq War is mixed and will be a weakness for him in the general election. I think Gerson is right. Here’s an excerpt: “Obama will find — as John Kerry found in 2004 — that Americans are suspicious of a prospective commander in chief who votes against funding U.S. troops in the field. “The Iraq war determined the paths for McCain and Obama. But there is a large difference between them. McCain eventually won his nomination because he showed political courage in the face of overwhelming pressure. Obama may eventually win his…