Well, a) she was selected because McCain thought she was HOT, and b) the campaign didn’t need to “use” her religiosity for her to be a massive concession to the evangelicals in question.

BUT, I’m mindful that I’m stating those premises as if they were facts, rather than speculative opinions. But similarly, I think your points above (other than perhaps the last one) fall under the same distinction.

At a minimum, she was an ardently pro-life individual (which doesn’t need to be “used,” but only needs to be true and public knowledge), and that was as least as important as pro-drilling?

In this sense Huckabee was different, as far as this Democrat could tell, from the fanatical anti-tax Republicans. I always thought he would have been a better general election candidate against Obama than McCain was.

The biggest mistake the Club for Growth made this cycle was making Huckabee their enemy. Now he has no incentive to cultivate them and those like them; he has decided to respond in kind and declare them anathema. People who think that Huckabee was some kind of economic populist once again mistake rhetoric for substance. No one would have said that Huckabee was well-versed in policy when he started running. He presented no danger to groups such as the Club. His tax proposal, while dismissed as loopy by the mainstream, should have been right up their alley with its abolition of corporate and capital gains taxes. For whatever reason, they opted to try to destroy him.

Was there a visceral dislike of Huckabee? Sure, but I think visceral dread is more accurate. The moneycons prefer their rube Christianist/socon allies to be lapdogs or know-nothings like Sarah Palin–a lapdog for the Club (drill baby drill), and a sop to the rubes in the base. (N.B.:Sarah Palin is best described not as an Evangelical but as a Fundamentalist.)

With Huckabee’s intelligence, persuasive skills, suggestion of integrity, and personal charm (I wouldn’t vote for him, but he’s a natural), the man presented a danger to the Republicans’ internal balance of power that that keeps the Club in power.

In the view of the McCain campaign, Palin’s virtue was that she was an energy “expert,” and coming out of the summer oil drilling had become the McCain campaign’s economic message. She was selected because she had “taken on the oil companies” and represented the new obsession with oil drilling. Whatever else she brought with her was incidental. Palin’s evangelicalism was not important to them, and the campaign made little or no use of her religiosity. She was well received by evangelicals and social conservatives, but that is a sign of how easily they are won over to support a lousy ticket. It is not an example of their influence.

http://www.clubforgrowth.org/2007/11/updated_huckabee_white_paper.php

And how can you discount the very selection of Palin herself as a sign of evangelicals’ influence within the party? She had NOTHING of substance to offer the ticket except her pew cred. Let’s face it, going after corrupt Alaska Republicans is rather like shooting fish in a barrel, and governing the state is to governing the nation as, well, the Alaska high school basketball championship is to the NCAA Final Four.

As for talking down (Red at 9:15), most of it isn’t that sophisticated or elitist – it’s just plain talking down. Republicans (and the conservative brand) got hammered. That’s what happens when you lose elections, and lose badly.

Putting that aside, this is an interesting place. I am glad Cole pointed me here.

I think it distorts Parker to interpret her words literally. Of course religion has a place in the greater world, but essentially it does belong in the heart. As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within”. We need to be careful to distinguish between the sacred role of religion, and its public role. THe word “sacred” means “to set apart”, in other words, to keep it safe from worldly intrusions. This is why Jesus threw out the money-lenders from the temple – it’s not that there’s something wrong with money-lending itself, it’s that they were violating the sacredness of the temple by conducting worldly business with it. And likewise, the worldly business of politics needs to be kept out of the termple as well. They are two different domains, that can seriously damage one another if mixed too freely, without respect for the distinction between sacred and worldly domains. Public religion has its own face and its own public debates, and so does politics. It’s best to mix them as little as possible, especially in the public sphere. Religion’s public face exists to ensure that we remain spiritually alive and in remembrance of God while engaged in worldly activities – meaning remembering Christ in our hearts while doing things that are not appropriate to the temple. But when the church tries to dictate the order of the public sphere, it has overstepped itself, just as when politics tries to dictate how we should worship. Not respecting those boundaries is a violation of “conservative values” in the most basic sense of not conserving the natural order of things.

Check out http://www.conservativetimes.org for “thoughtful” anti-war and anti-Bush commentary.

But readable righties, who are willing to be open and honest about their goals for the future of the country (being something more than “win” or “f*** over the Democrats”) and engage with their political opponents, are extraordinarily rare.

So rare, that I find it this blog to be one of a very short list that includes:

Culture11
Outside The Beltway
Volokh Conspiracy (especially since the election’s over)
and that’s about it.

(Other suggestions for thoughtful conservative commentary welcome.)

1. Establish the party’s bona-fides on good government. The party will find sympathetic voters if it adheres to an irreproachable level of ethics and accountability in managing the federal government. Republicans must expect no traction for criticism of Democratic ethical or other lapses until the they get their own house painstakingly sterilized. Just going two years, let alone four, without a major sex or money scandal would be an immense help in recovering support from independents.
2. Accept that several of the Democratic Party’s goals are contiguous with the will of most Americans: restraint in international conflicts, widened health-care access, infrastructure improvements, investment in renewable energy sources and environmental protection. Instead of devoting most of the party’s energies to strategies of blocking big-government efforts toward these goals, make bona-fide efforts to help Democrats achieve them as quickly, rationally, efficiently and fairly as possible. In the short run this very likely will require conservatives to swallow some pride and absorb some losses in power. But in the long run, if the nation is better off, the GOP is positioned as well as possible to take some of the credit. If the nation is worse off, the GOP is well positioned to tell voters, “We tried their plan. It didn’t work. Try ours.” Wouldn’t this be a more effective pitch than “We’re protecting your interests through gridlock”?
3. Instead of representing fundamentalists bureaucratically through broad and unrealistic legislative goals, engage them individually at the grass-roots level with a consistent, crystal-clear message: that however sympathetic the party is to achieving fundamentalist goals in Washington, legislative success is impossible while fundamentalists are a dwindling minority. The only truly effective way for their causes to prevail is to try to persuade their fellow citizens to support them. Besides establishing realistic expectations for the party, this has the added benefit of being true and therefore not insulting fundamentalists’ intelligence. Ideally it would also motivate fundamentalists to try to expand their influence in more constructive ways.

To the extent that nationalism overtakes or becomes their religion, we might say that this secular religion is the main problem. That doesn’t mean that they are particularly influential, but rather points to how much they have been influenced by the “national security” bunch.

I like this formulation about the problem (for the GOP) with Palinite-type fundies who have conflated nationalism with their idee fixe anti-abortion and millenarian constructs.

This sort of thinking is, as most sensible Americans can see, irrational, ill-informed, intellectually unsavory, and a couple of other things, including whacked out. I have no idea how the GOP recoups from here, but I do think it starts (for the secular right) with chucking the knee-jerk wedge-politics cynicism and embracing real ideas that mean something and promise a better life to most Americans.

Why do I come here? Because I’m looking for some intelligent and fair-minded conservative to discuss the ailing and future of the party (because I believe in the necessity of a contrary movement to liberalism if the best of both worlds is to be achieved).

And, notably, it would be interesting if a conservative could admit that this would be an ideal state of affairs, acknowledging that numerous progresses of the 20th Century that we now take for granted came from the liberal direction. It would be ideal if conservatism became a brake against the excesses, and quit being obstructionist against the good ideas (like single-payer or, God help us!, action on climate change).

But to the issue at hand, it would also be good if sensible Christians could play a role in marginalizing the whackjobs. Because you may have noticed that the “conservative” movement is driving away *most* of the sensible people. And who or what is doing that? The people and policies that are hostile to science, facts, and *reason*.

Abstinence-only is INSANE. Terry Schiavo’s plight illustrated delusion. Disbelief in global warming is *suicidal*. That “more God in the public sphere” will solve our problems has proven irrelevant to the serious issues of this century. And urgency about creationism, or even lip service toward it, is making a laughing stock of a party that *used* to be about policy, reason, and pragmatism.

Somewhere along the line, fueled by the Christian whackjobs and Rush Limbaugh, your party quit being the party of decency, honesty, science, and reason. It became the party of disdain and contempt and “win at any cost,” regardless what they’d do with the victory. And catering to the whackjobs has both fueled this and institutionalized it.

I am not telling you this to rail at you. I am telling you because I hope you can see that it is true (or give you a little help if you’re still fuzzy). Yes, Iraq was the debacle that contributed to the landslide, but Bush himself was the logical culmination of whackjob principles writ large (not least of which: the utter disdain for facts, honesty, or second-guessing its motives).

I don’t give a damn about Kathleen Parker at the moment, other than her role in at least spurring further this discussion that conservatives need to have. The cancer within your party is also a cancer within our nation.

And the more quickly intelligent conservatives like you realize that the GOP *does* have cancer that has addled its brains, the more quickly you can engage the necessary surgery to become a functional and constructive party again. Which I dearly and truly want to happen.

I’m no Democrat really, with no outstanding faith in them. But the GOP of the modern era is a MENACE, owned by a force as dangerous as Islamic fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, regardless of its roots.

And I hope you could become one of the voices to help marginalize it in the USA. For all our sakes, not least of which your own ideals.

So about Kathleen Parker, don’t miss the forest she’s talking about while you nitpick the trees.

gsmart, I am most certainly not the GOP base. I am a member of the Constitution Party, attended their convention, vocally supported Chuck Baldwin, voted for him and urged others to do the same.

But it’s the perception that matters.

Make no mistake, the GOP’s opponents – particularly now – are very interested in seeing the Republican Party identified with its culturally conservative base. Because the notion that the whole party believes, even now in the midst of this economic meltdown, that (for example) abortion is the premier political issue facing the nation, and should trump all else, helps the Democrats immensely. The Democrats then say – look – these people are untethered from reality. And that perception, particularly if you’ve lost your job or have watched your home-heating bill double, sticks.

So what Parker is talking about, in the long run, may be the GOP’s PR problem. I agree with you that the party has done little but throw symbolic bones to cultural conservatives, but those symbolic bones have been (as they were intended to be) very high profile. It actually may be in the GOP’s interest to deliver a little more on the promises made – while at the same time de-emphasizing those promises in terms of public rhetoric.