The Two Republican Parties

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama today underscores how clearly and irreparably John McCain has split open the fault line in the GOP.

In going against McCain, whom he has known and admired for two decades, the party's keynote speaker in 2000 and former Bush Secretary of State cited Sarah Palin and the William Ayers tone of the Republican campaign and praised the "inclusive nature" of Obama's as key reasons for his decision.

If, against all odds, McCain wins, traditional Republicans like Powell and those pillars of the GOP before the rise of the Religious Right and Karl Rove's divisive tactics will be all but shut out.

If McCain loses, the struggle for the soul of a battered minority party will be ideologically fierce. The signs are already emerging:

*"In the end," Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal, "the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism."

*The son of the National Review's founding father, William F. Buckley, is forced out for supporting Obama. “But to paraphrase Ronald Reagan," Christopher Buckley explains, "I didn’t leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me.”

*Traditional Republican voices, such as those of columnists George Will and David Brooks, have been lamenting the direction of the party and the tone of the campaign.

For decades to come, political analysts will be debating John McCain's decision to move rightward rather than appeal to centrists as the maverick he once was but is now just the basis for an empty slogan.

But win or lose, he will have shaken up the Republican Party for years to come.

Conservative Doubts About the New McCain

With the struggle for his political soul between the Religious Right and Reagan Republicans settled by the choice of a running mate, there are increasing qualms about the new John McCain by traditional voices in his own party.

"Under the pressure of the financial crisis," writes conservative icon George Will, "one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama."

This comes after the Wall Street Journal labels McCain's call for the resignation of SEC Chairman Christopher Cox "unpresidential," demonstrating that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

"McCain's populist bent," CNN reports, "has made some fellow Republicans unhappy" about "his election year migration toward more government control of the economy."

But the doubts run deeper than unhappiness over his stance on the financial bailout.

"Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial," George Will observes, "usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

"It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?"

In an analysis of McCain's decision-making, PBS News Hour quotes his own description: "As a politician, I am instinctive, often impulsive...I don't torture myself over decisions. I make them as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow, if I can. Often, my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint."

On that program, McCain's best friend in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, admitted that he wanted Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge for VP but their pro-choice positions ruled them out.

In picking Palin," Graham says, he wanted "to let the American people know that, if he gets to be president, buckle your seats, because we're going to do things different...I'm not so sure it was impulse, certainly from his gut."

As Election Day nears, more and more Americans, including conservative Republicans, are worrying out loud about government by McCain's intestines.

Religious Right's VP Choices

If John McCain wants to protect his extreme flank, George Bush's favorite evangelist has a few suggestions.

In an interview, Southern Baptist spokesman Richard Land vetoes as a pro-choice "catastrophe" Tom Ridge and, reluctantly, Joe Lieberman, who he "would love to have" as Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State. (In 2002, they both evangelized for Iraq as a "just war.")

Who does Land like? "Governor (Sarah) Palin of Alaska...She just had her fifth child, a Downs Syndrome child...She's strongly pro-life. She's a virtual lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. She would ring so many bells."

Mitt Romney "would be an excellent choice" but "about 15 to 20 percent of the evangelical community would have a problem with his Mormonism."

Land's interfaith selection is Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor, "a conservative, observant Jew, a one hundred percent pro-life voting record," who defeated Cooter Jones of the "Dukes Of Hazzard" for the Richmond seat in 2002.

If McCain makes it, Rev. Land would look forward to a VP who might continue his weekly White House conference calls initiated by Karl Rove to make sure the Administration continues to be on guard against such threats as John Lennon's "Imagine," the "secular anthem" for a future of "clone plantations, child sacrifice, legalized polygamy and hard-core porn."

But no matter who turns out to be his running mate, McCain is sure to have Land's at least lukewarm support against Barack Obama who "has never met an abortion that he couldn't...live with."

The Lost McCain

If he had not been sidetracked in 2000 by the Bush-Rove smear machine, John McCain might have attracted enough Independents and so-called Reagan Democrats to win the White House without the help of the Supreme Court.

In that event, would we have been spared not only the Bush years but the far different McCain who is contending for the Presidency this year?

In power after 9/11, McCain would not have had a Dick Cheney and his Neo-Cons to torture intelligence into a case for invading Iraq and, even with his own quasi-religious faith in military force, might have presided over a saner response to the threat of Islamic extremism.

But that McCain, who charmed the media with his candor, is long gone, vaporized by bitterness over what Bush et al did to him back then, by his decision to court the Religious Right he once disdained, by tailoring his views on tax cuts for the very rich to win over the Grover Norquist gang in the primaries, by hooking up with the likes of Joe Lieberman to become the champion of a war he might never have started.

In the coming months, Democrats will have to work hard to make voters understand that this year's Republican standard bearer is not the John McCain of 2000, who would not have needed Lieberman to whisper in his ear after confusing Iran and al Qaeda, who would not be entrusting his own professed ignorance about the economy to those who helped deregulate us into recession, who might have included Independents and Democrats in an administration back then but would be too compromised to do so now.

McCain has always had a romanticized picture of himself that an admiring media has helped perpetuate. His favorite movie, "Viva Zapata," is about an uncompromising man of the people done in by petty politicians, an image that helps explain constant battles with members of his own party in the Senate and displays of temper when challenged.

As the rightmost Republicans who changed him over the past eight years try to sell McCain as the man he was then, it will be up to the Democratic candidate to bring down that Wizard of Oz façade without alienating voters who respect his lifetime of service to the country.

When all the primary garbage is cleared away, Barack Obama will be in a better position to do that than Hillary Clinton.

McCain, Obama: The Generation Chasm

After years of Bush's would-be and as-if leadership, American voters are choosing authenticity, albeit with a 24-year age gap and a world of difference in personal history and mindset.

Of all the accusations that could, and likely will, be made against John McCain and Barack Obama, the least plausible will involve calculation and deceit.

Last night's victory speeches laid out the broad outlines of their confrontation.

Turning Obama's central theme against him, McCain said, "My hope for our country resides in my faith in the American character, the character which proudly defends the right to think and do for ourselves, but perceives self-interest in accord with a kinship of ideals, which, when called upon, Americans will defend with their very lives.

"To encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude."

Against McCain's message of traditional values, Obama offered a new approach: "This is what change looks like when it happens from the bottom up. And in this election, your voices will be heard.

"Because at a time when so many people are struggling to keep up with soaring costs in a sluggish economy, we know that the status quo in Washington just won't do. Not this time. Not this year. We can't keep playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expect a different result--because it's a game that ordinary Americans are losing."

This contest of new vs. old promises to feature civility and positive attitude from both candidates, although there will certainly be Rovian low blows from third-party fringes on both sides.

In stepping up to face each other, both candidates in passing repudiated those on their own side who opposed them.

Obama framed the Democratic outcome as a decision "about whether we choose to play the game, or whether we choose to end it...change that polls well, or change we can believe in. It's the past versus the future. And when I'm the Democratic nominee for President, that will be the choice in November."

On his part, McCain gave an oblique "kiss my grits" to the Religious Right by talking about faith in his supporters, the "American character" and "our country" without the obligatory bow to a Higher Power.

With Obama acknowledging McCain as "an American hero," the '08 contest is definitely looking up.

Separation of Church and State of Mind

On Meet the Press today, Mike Huckabee answered a question about punishing doctors for performing abortions: "I think if a doctor knowingly took the life of an unborn child for money, and that's why he was doing it, yeah, I think you would, you would find some way to sanction that doctor. I don't know that you'd put him in prison, but..."

After protestations that he would never "use the government institutions to impose mine or anybody else's faith or to restrict" others, Huckabee undermines that reassurance by saying he would ban all abortions "not just because I'm a Christian, that's because I'm an American," thereby consigning all those who don't agree that life begins at conception to the same status he gives illegal immigrants.

Therein lies the danger of Huckabee to the separation of church and state--that as a man whose faith "really defines me," his definition of issues would erase that traditional line without acknowledging it as all previous presidents have scrupulously done.

Even George Bush's fake piety, used by Karl Rove to swindle the Religious Right, never extended that far. Banning gay marriage disappeared as an issue right after the elections.

Commendably, Huckabee reassured Tim Russert he would include atheists in his White House, but the Constitution requires the President to be more than smoothly tolerant of others' beliefs or lack of them. If he is nominated by Republicans, whether or not Mike Huckabee understands that will be one of the main issues in 2008.

Republican Squeaky Wheels

The overhyped story of the 2008 elections so far is the role of the Religious Right in picking a GOP candidate, fueled by headlines about Huckabee's commercial cross, Romney's speech on "Faith in America," Pat Robertson's underwhelming endorsement of Giuliani and the Rev. James Dobson's serial excommunication of each aspirant as he edges toward supporting his fellow preacher.

But this media melodrama may be obscuring the decline of the so-called God Vote in Republican politics, starting last November when opposition to the war in Iraq overwhelmed candidates of the Bush theocracy and gave control of Congress to the Democrats.

Even as Huckabee rises in the polls, prominent Republicans are questioning what Peggy Noonan calls his "creepy" appeal and, in New Hampshire, the resurgence of the resolutely secular John McCain is threatening Romney.

A new Gallup poll offers some perspective, showing only 32 percent of Americans now feel religion is increasing its influence in national life, compared to the Eisenhower era half a century ago when 69 percent felt that way.

A recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that "younger white evangelicals have become increasingly dissatisfied with Bush and are moving away from the GOP."

In October, Mike Huckabee told the Values Voters summit, “I come today as one not who comes to you, but as one who comes from you. You are my roots.” Nonetheless, Romney won the straw poll after the meeting.

Now that Huckabee is surging and real voting is about to begin, Republicans will give us some answers about what kind of President they want after George Bush's pious pronouncements and disastrous performance. "Cultural conservatives" may be in for some surprises.

A Referendum on Church and State

As long as we have come this far in George Bush's undeclared theocracy and Mitt Romney's open endorsement this week, doesn't the Republican Party owe Americans a clear choice--a Huckabee-Romney or Romney-Huckabee ticket--that would, in effect, be a referendum on the separation of church and state?

Some may fear the outcome of such a confrontation with a more secular Democratic ticket, but the alternative is to keep allowing the Religious Right to keep dominating the American conversation far out of proportion to be their true numbers and in contradiction to a consensus that existed in the nation's politics since 1776 until Islamic terrorists gave Bush's Christian absolutists a climate of fear in which to propagate their own extremism.

Failure to bring this debate out into the open allows a unthinking nod of heads to Romney's religiosity that asserts "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom."

For over 200 years, Americans have subscribed to the proposition that freedom requires freedom and that everyone, in the words of John F. Kennedy "has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice...where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials."

In claiming his right as a Catholic to be considered for the presidency, Kennedy was affirming the separation of church and state. In claiming his right as a Mormon, Romney is blurring that tradition.

"I would not look with favor," JFK told Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960, "upon a President working to subvert the first amendment's guarantees of religious liberty...And neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test, even by indirection. For if they disagree with that safeguard, they should be openly working to repeal it."

Responding to Romney's speech, Huckabee, the former preacher, said "it's a good thing and healthy for all of us for people to discuss faith in the public square," but diplomatically evaded details of his own, such as his views on evolution and women as pastors, noting that "where two or more Baptists are gathered together, there are at least seven different opinions."

Until now, Democrats have been unwilling to confront this question, settling for affirmation of their own faith in addressing evangelicals but not drawing the distinction between religion as a private matter and a deeply divisive public issue.

By nominating Huckabee and/or Romney, the Republican Party would inevitably make that part of the choice for the kind of America voters envision and want.

What's Offensive Is Romney's Religiosity

He has painted himself into a corner and, no matter where Mitt Romney goes in tonight's speech on religion, he is going to leave messy footprints.

Even the locale is a mistake. Meant to evoke a parallel with John F. Kennedy's deft defense of his Catholicism in 1960, it only underscores how much the role of religion has changed in American politics and, in the Bush era, for the worse.

In Kennedy's time, separation of church and state was an article of faith for mainstream politicians of both parties. Until then, Presidents had all been white Protestant men. Kennedy, in trying to broaden the definition to white Protestant or Catholic men, was arguing that religious belief may be a reflection of a President's principles but is not substantively involved in how he governs.

"I believe," he told Protestant ministers in Houston, "in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish...where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all...

"I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."

Voters agreed and, in Gore Vidal’s 1960 play, “The Best Man,” as a former President recalls the old days when politicians “had to pour God over everything like ketchup,” audiences laughed at the anachronism.

Nobody is laughing now. George W. Bush has erased the line between church and state to the point where Romney, as a candidate, has been pandering to the Religious Right to win the nomination. It is that religiosity, not his religion, that is offensive.

Now Romney, still holding the ketchup bottle, will try to persuade voters that as President he would "maintain our religious heritage in this country," as he recently put it, but that his own particular religious beliefs are beside the point.

Romney is essentially a salesman (in amassing millions, associates say he was the "presenter") who has tailored his pitch on many issues this year to what voters want to hear. If he can sell this one, maybe he deserves to be President and use his skills to persuade the world to stop hating us.

Strangest Bedfellows

Pat Robertson, icon of the Religious Right, today endorsed a thrice-married, cross-dressing, pro-choice Catholic for President in 2008.

"I thought it was important for me to make it clear that Rudy Giuliani is more than acceptable to people of faith," said Robertson. "Given the fractured nature of the process, I thought it was time to solidify around one candidate."

The move was foreshadowed in June when Giuliani addressed a leadership conference at Robertson's Regent University and, according to its web site, the founder "reflected on the Mayor’s legendary performance after the tragic events of September 11th, citing the world’s recognition of his extraordinary leadership in a time of unthinkable crisis. With his trademark good humor, Dr. Robertson related the story of their shared prior cancer diagnoses, and his hospital-room call from the Mayor to offer words of encouragement."

The Robertson endorsement will go a long way to consummate Giuliani's courtship of the Religious Right and fend off the challenges on that front from Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee.

Republicans' Faith-Based Choice

The former Arkansas Governor, a Baptist minister, is becoming everybody’s favorite conservative, except for the Religious Right. Arguably the smartest and most personable of Republican Presidential contenders, Mike Huckabee is stuck in single digits and woeful campaign contribution numbers.

The reason may be his faith. After years of George Bush’s self-righteous religiosity, Republican true believers seem leery of Huckabee’s traditional approach to Christian values that calls for brotherhood and humility.

Unlike Bush, Huckabee grew up in poverty and embraced his religion from childhood, rather than as a middle-aged man grasping for salvation when his over-privileged life was falling apart.

Joe Klein of Time describes him as “a political inconvenience, a destroyer of stereotypes” with a new constituency of Second Commandment Christians who live by the Golden Rule and are “more interested in salvation than damnation.”

“I believe,” Huckabee told him, “that life begins at conception, but I don't believe it ends at birth. I believe we have a responsibility to feed the hungry, to provide a good education, a safe neighborhood, health care.”

In a recent Pew Center forum, moderated by Washington Post liberal columnist E. J. Dionne, he went beyond debate sound bites about evolution and explained his philosophy of governing.

“I was absolutely embarrassed and ashamed of my own government,” he said, “in the response to Katrina. I saw on TV people on the bridges of Interstate 10 stranded for days without water, and I thought...These were the neighbors just to the south of us in Louisiana...We were not going to allow them to be further traumatized, depersonalized and dehumanized by stacking them in some sports arena and calling that a rescue.”

Republican voters may still be too mesmerized by Bush’s fake piety to give Huckabee a fair hearing, but his showing in the Iowa straw poll suggests some are listening.

Back in January, Dionne called Huckabee “the brightest star among Republican presidential dark horses” who “has maintained what you might call loyal distance” from Bush’s Iraq disaster. Voters may begin to notice that, too.

Conservative Blessing for Clinton?

Michael Gerson, my favorite Evangelical columnist, writes approvingly today about Hillary Clinton as “the most religious Democrat since Jimmy Carter,” citing “her Methodist upbringing as a formative experience, with its emphasis on ‘preaching and practicing the social gospel.’"

Gerson, alarmed by Rudy Giuliani’s iffy pro-life conversion, may be grasping at ecclesiastic straws here, pointing out that Clinton “participates regularly in small-group Bible studies and is familiar with the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer--the theological heroes of mainline Protestantism (and of some stray Evangelicals like myself).”

Sen. Clinton may be surprised to learn how much she has in common with George W. Bush’s favorite speech writer, in light of the fact that she wrote her senior thesis about an non-believing Jewish radical, Saul Alinsky, in what most would consider her “formative” years.

Gerson’s subtext here is clearly a warning to Giuliani to get more fervent with promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v Wade.

Hillary as a darling of the Religious Right? Gerson had better start looking for a needle with a very big eye.