the grand ol’ divide

by Ryan Schuette

Published: April 4, 2008

This week Focus on the Family founder James Dobson lobbed an assault on Sen. John McCain (AZ-R), saying the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has “written off” social conservatives by refusing to support their initiatives, according to CNN.

Dobson joins an increasingly loud chorus of social conservatives who find sharp disagreements with Sen. McCain on issues like abortion and marriage, reflecting less a Grand Ol’ Party than a Grand Ol’ Split - itself symptomatic of a house ideologically divided, and a political party distressed by internal variances.

To say the Republican Party or the Democratic Party should or have always been united voting blocs would hint at ignorance. At various times, these parties have both thrown punches under the proverbial tent. Think Roosevelt-Taft ‘12, Ford-Reagan ‘76 or Carter-Kennedy ‘79 - more recently Clinton-Obama ‘08 - great boxing matches in the history of presidential politics and party disputes.

This is different.

In 2008 the Republican Party is poised to endorse a nominee who has kept little pretense about his opinions regarding social conservatives, at one point calling the most outspoken ones - most notably the late but not missed Jerry Falwell - “agents of intolerance” in 2000, according to Newsweek.

It’s easy for a pundit to aggrandize these verbal spats but the signs are there. In his statement, published by The Wall Street Journal, Dobson called Sen. McCain out on his senate votes against the Federal Marriage Amendment. CNN reports the Arizona senator believes the decision to define marriage - as between a man and woman or civil unions - falls to the states, not the federal government.

Herein lies a larger - and precarious - philosophical division between key elements of the Republican Party, circa 2008. Whereas the Reaganomics crowd, credibly represented by the late William Buckley, Jr., and currently by Sen. McCain, stands (or claims to stand) aright small-government principles, the other part, consisting of neo-know-nothings and religious righters, like Dobson and Falwell’s followers, care less about constitutional consistency than they do sustaining a semblance of traditional society (traditional in their heads, anyway).

This threatens to secure a Democratic victory for the simple fact that the religious right, well-known to be bread and butter for the GOP, will stay home on November 8, encouraged by Dobson and others like radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who said a McCain nomination would “destroy the party,” this according to his Web site.

I should note Limbaugh felt the same way about Mike Huckabee, but the most transparent family feud lay between those who think government should restrain itself from intervening in the lives of Americans and those who don’t. The split is real - at the top and among card-carrying Republican voters.

There’s no hiding this - Huckabee, the should-have-been Christian Party candidate, absorbed religious furor in delegate counts and prevented Sen. McCain from corralling the number necessary to clinch nomination for at least one more month.

The final tally? The Republican Party of 2012 will not represent the party in 2008. As another Republican once put it, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Either social conservatives will hold their noses and vote for Nominee McCain or they won’t, and “change” really will come to the White House - and the Republican Party. Maybe for the better.

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