Nope. She’s right.
You have Old Wiley S. Drake asking his followers to pray for the deaths of his opponents. Too many bible -thumping hypocrites. Leave religion out of the party. Else, the Republican Party is dead. And, no ressurection in sight.

Now that that’s out of the way, Palin is, in a way, a microcosm of the Republican Party’s future. She has a measure of credibility with both libertarians and social conservatives, by virtue of embracing both self-reliance and traditional family values in her own life. But if she wants to run for President in 2012 she will have the same choice to make between those two worlds as does the GOP itself. Indeed, Palin’s choice could set the tone for the party as a whole if she wins the nomination, or even if she narrowly loses it.

Remember, soon it will be time for a republican to be the ‘Change We Can Believe In.’

I’ve been saying for months now that we are in the middle of a realignmentperiod in the party structure, and the GOP is ill equipped. Unfortunately they have tied their political future to groups which are demographically on the decline, and are opposed to groups who will grow over time, the young, and minority groups.

Really their only hope is that Obama screws up big in the next four years

Kael is frequently quoted as having said, in the wake of Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, that she “couldn’t believe Nixon had won”, since no one she knew had voted for him. The quote is sometimes cited by conservatives (such as Bernard Goldberg, in his book Bias), as an example of allegedly clueless New York liberal insularity. There are variations as to the exact wording, the speaker (it has variously been attributed to other liberal women, including Katharine Graham, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion) and the timing (in addition to Nixon’s victory, it has been claimed to have been uttered after Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984.)

There is, in fact, no record of Kael making such a remark. The story may have originated in a December 28, 1972 New York Times article on a lecture Kael gave at the Modern Language Association, in which the newspaper quoted her as saying, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

I am going to keep following this argument where social liberals tell the GOP how to fix their party, and then give instructions based on what the vast majority of conservatives believe is at best a gross caricature of their party. It’s really helping me to learn more about the schism between the views of liberals and conservatives.

I count myself among those potential converts who’d more strongly consider siding with the GOP if I felt they were less in thrall to social conservatives. But I am also looking closely at my personal judgements as to the actual extent to which they really are. I know I have rabbit ears, but I also think some conservatives turn a blind eye.

We know that the GOP has had a fair amount of success from Reagan forward. And socons were definitely on board for that run.Remember, just a few years ago, some liberals were pondering their OWN demise. So I’m inclined to say

What a difference a win makes, huh?”

When one party sweeps another out, this is always likely to lead to overreach. Because the glow of victory can lead folks to make dreamy assumptions about why the win happened. The most zealous want to view a win as a total triumph for their superior philosophy. But does the polling and the demographics support this contention? No. There are more Americans who identify as conservative than liberal, and there are more folks who identify as independent than liberal.

Further, liberals benefitted from a truly exceptional political messenger in Barack Obama. If you take a second to notice that the GOP is STILL looking for the next Ronald Reagan, then take another second to consider whether you are looking into a crystal ball of sorts. Then ask, how much of this win is evidence of a vast philosophical shift, and how much is evidence that your side currently has singular champion: a Tiger Woods, a Martina Navritilova, etc.

Further how much of the win ought to be attributed to operating under singularly advantageous political circumstances. You just beat a two-term incumbent party running an unpopular war while the economy was undergoing what looks to be the worst collapse in nearly a century. And this was done by betaing a challenger who was old, whose policy strengths were a bad fit for the current circumstances, and who enjoyed no more than lukewarm support from the vast majority of his party.

Point is, the nature of this election was that it was an exception, not the rule. The future probably holds a return to less exceptional circumstances and less exceptional candidates…a parade of Doles, Kerrys, Gores, and so on.

These trends may or may not turn out to devastate the GOP, but Democrats would do themselves a favor by not counting on it. The McCain-Palin ticket got 46% of the vote in the face of widespread and deep public discontent with Bush and after an economic train wreck rolled over the country. Not bad, considering.

Just four years ago, George W. Bush was releected notwithstanding all those nasty Bible-thumpers (and not incidentally with a far higher proportion of Latino votes than McCain got) who apparently didn’t trouble Parker so much then And four or eight years from now, who knows? A swirch of three or four million voters out of 130 million is all it takes.

Palin wound up being a drag on the GOP ticket in key swing areas, to be sure, but the toughest rap on her was her inexperience and unreadiness to be President, along with the widely accepted belief (fair or unfair) that she’s dumb. That she is an evangelical or Pentacostal Christian would, by itself, surely have been no more important than was George W. Bush’s proclaimed born-again faith in 2000 or 2004. As for whether the fact that Republicans generally oppose abortion and gay marriage has had a decisive impact anywhere, one need look no further than California, where voters rejected gay marriage while giving Obama one of his biggest pluralities to understand that it’s just not so.

Where the GOP’s being too captive ot its right wing hurts most, I think, is not on social issues but economic concerns. John McCain was never quite able to articulate an attractive economic message because he felt constrained by the need to keep reciting the Republican free enterprise-free markets-free trade mantra.