An Obit for the Republican Majority...

David Ignatius in today's Washington Post:

The Republicans come to their present troubles from different directions: President Bush thought he was making a safe, pragmatic choice in nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, but this soulless maneuver enraged the party's right wing and set it on a fratricidal binge. Tom DeLay thought he was ramrodding a permanent Republican government, but he managed to get himself indicted and, well before that calamity, had angered House Republicans who concluded that "The Hammer's" leadership style was marching them off a cliff. Looming over all these little problems is the crucible of Iraq.

What's interesting is that most of these wounds are self-inflicted. They draw a picture of a party that, for all its seeming dominance, isn't prepared to be the nation's governing party. The hard right, which is the soul of the modern GOP, would rather be ideologically pure than successful. Governing requires making compromises and getting your hands dirty, but the conservative purists disdain those qualities. They swim for that beach with a fiercely misguided determination, and they demand that the other whales accompany them.

The bickering over the Miers nomination epitomizes the right's refusal to assume the role of a majoritarian governing party. The awkward fact for conservatives is that the American public doesn't agree with them on abortion rights. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll in late August found 54 percent describing themselves as pro-choice and only 38 percent as pro-life, roughly the same percentages as a decade ago.

That's the political reality that Bush has been trying to finesse with his nominations of John Roberts and Miers. That's why he said in the 2000 primary campaign that he wouldn't impose any litmus test (when other Republicans were demanding one) and would instead focus on a nominee's character and judicial philosophy. The realist in Bush understands that he can't easily force a nominee who is openly antiabortion on a country where a solid majority disagrees.

Read the whole thing. It's an excellent piece of work.

The fact is that the Republicans aren't willing to compromise. The Republican Majority has spent the last 25 years courting Evangelical Christians. For the Republican Party it was about creating a majority to obtain political power, and not about truly sharing the values of this constituency.

The sad part is that the way the Republican Party has manipulated Evangelical Christians for a quarter century. Evangelicals have lived under the false impression that they were the movement. They were not. The goal was to obtain political power. They did that. They did so using a team of people that came out of Nixon's administration and Acolytes that joined them during the Reagan years, people who were not Movement Evangelicals.

Evangelical Christians in this country are suffering from a form of abused wife syndrome. The Republican Party has never taught them to love the Republican Party, but rather to hate the Democratic Party. Once the Democrats were thoroughly demonized, the Republican Party knew they could behave any way they wished, because of their absolute certainty that the Christian base would not defect to the democrats, and that's all they cared about.

Cronyism, Corporatism, a shrinking middle class, a lack of health care... The kicker is that abortion is still legal, and even Pat Buchanan is now saying that he believes that Bush doesn't want Roe overturned.

So, all of you "movement conservatives" need to start realizing that you got played. Say what you want about the Democrats, but you always knew where you stood with the Democratic Party.

It's soul searching time.