Take That! And That!

Kathleen Parker, one of the conservative recusants who balked at following Sarah Palin into the wilderness, now makes so bold as to suggest that G-O-D is the big problem for the G-O-P. That is, the party’s problem is that it’s wedded itself to a base of married white people who believe in carrying their religious […]

Jesus votes Republican.jpgKathleen Parker, one of the conservative recusants who balked at following Sarah Palin into the wilderness, now makes so bold as to suggest that G-O-D is the big problem for the G-O-P. That is, the party’s problem is that it’s wedded itself to a base of married white people who believe in carrying their religious vision into the public square. She doesn’t get all her facts right–for example, non-observant American twenty-somethings do tend to take up religion later in life–and there’s more than a whiff of the old WaPo “poor, uneducated and easy to command” in her dismissal of the “lowest of brows.” But the burden of her critique, that the old moral majority is now a shrinking minority, will be harder to wave away.
Actually, the so-called leaders of the Republican base are, it seems to me, well aware of the problem. That’s why they balked at embracing Mike Huckabee’s upstart campaign a year ago. In his new book, Huck has choice words for a number of them and, so far as I can tell from the quoted excerpts, almost acknowledges the problem. Rather than acting as true believers, they cared too much about, well, winning the election. Sarah Palin swept them away, but waking up in the clear light of post-election reality, even they are likely to find her a rather less attractive repository for their hopes and dreams than they imagined the night before.

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