(Sorry about that. What was I thinking? Back to rehab for me.)
Dan, speaking as a Christian rightist, I find the travails of the Christian Right made manifest by this political year to be perhaps the biggest political story going. I’ve never been able to figure out why secular journalists pay so much attention to the political pronouncements of the Roman Catholic bishops, given that almost no Catholics take their political direction from them (we are long past those days). I’m not an Evangelical, but I’ve been hearing from plugged-in Evo friends for the past few years that the media are out of touch with the Evo grassroots; they (journalists) think that James Dobson, Pat Robertson, et alia, speak politically for the Evo masses, but they don’t. We’re really seeing that this year, aren’t we? What’s more, the power of Christian conservatives over the Republican Party really has ebbed dramatically — something we’re also seeing.
As readers of my Crunchy Con blog know, I’m very far from gruntled with this year’s crop of Republicans. Though I’m a registered Republican, if I vote in the Texas primary, it will be for Ron Paul, as a protest. I can easily see sitting out the 2008 general election. Still, I have a soft spot in my heart for Huck, and I don’t understand why, given how wide open the GOP race still is, the religious conservative machers don’t unite behind Huck. They’re trying to preserve their place at the table by endorsing pragmatically. Huckabee is by no means out of this race; as Our Big Cheese Editor points out, if the Religious Right openly backed Huckabee, he’d be in a better position to take this thing.