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Muslims wish Obama would be more positive about Islam: Reaction to candidate's response to rumors

Muslim Americans and political observers heralded the 2006 elections as a sort of debutante’s ball for the Muslim voter, when anger and organizational heft pushed unprecedented numbers of Muslim citizens to vote and get involved with U.S. politics.

The 2008 election cycle, however, isn’t quite working out that way. Many Muslim Americans sense that presidential candidates have, at worst, conflated their faith with terrorism and, at best, treated them as a liability to be kept at arm’s length.

Huckabee: Critics dwell on his pastor past: "A small, arcane part of my biography"

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says that critics have unfairly focused on his former career as a Southern Baptist pastor rather than his role as Arkansas governor.

“It’s been fascinating to me that people have tried to marginalize me as a candidate of the fringe,” said Huckabee at a February 12 breakfast meeting with reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

Political affliations of evangelicals shift: A more even distribution

A raft of recent polls and books suggest to some observers that the evangelical vote may be returning to a more even distribution between the Republican and Democratic parties.

One indication was a Zogby International poll released February 11 showing that about one-third of white evangelicals who voted in two Super Tuesday states voted in the Democratic primaries.