Reuters´ Chrystia Freeland and Perry´s "faith-based approach"

Chrystia Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital is doing her part in the Obama re-election campaign:

What does Obama really stand for?
To his critics on the right, the president is a socialist with dangerous foreign antecedents. To his critics on the left, he is a waffler with no real point of view and a craven desire to be liked.
Krueger’s nomination points to an entirely different explanation: The president is an empiricist. He wants to do what works, not what conforms to a particular ideology or what pleases a particular constituency. His core belief is a belief in facts.

Freeland then goes on to compare the great scientific "empiricist" Obama with the Rick Perry and other Republican candidates with a "faith-based approach" (read: Christian anti-science simpletons):

But as the presidential campaign begins to heat up, starting with the Republican primary race, the empirical worldview that Obama embodies is taking a beating. The candidates who have made the strongest start are those with a proudly faith-based approach. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released this week, Governor Rick Perry of Texas is the Republican front-runner. He spoke at a Christian religious rally on the eve of entering the primary contest last month and has questioned the science of evolution and climate change.
The Republican Party has its own evidence-based candidates, and they are struggling to respond to the faith-based worldview that Perry so powerfully embodies. One of them, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., is playing up his credentials as the right’s empiricist. He has said he thinks climate change is a fact and warned Republicans against becoming the “anti-science party.”
Mitt Romney, who was the front-runner before Perry blazed onto the scene, has been more ambivalent. Romney’s business background puts him squarely in the camp of the empiricists: it is hard to make millions in private equity without appreciating the power of data. But Romney knows who votes in Republican primaries, and last week he hedged his previously explicit position on climate change.

Read the entire blog post here

There is something almost sinister in the way Freeland and other Obama supporters are trying to portrait Christians who - together with thousands of scientists - are critical of the science of human induced global warming, as being anti-science. But expect more if it, when the election campaign intensifies. 

Whether we will hear more about the great scientific "empiricist" Obama, remains to be seen. So far, it is rather difficult to find proof for Freeland´s claim that "His core belief is a belief in facts."