Sunday, December 17, 2006
Pander bears
Jonathan Chait takes a look at the "Great Suck-Up" now taking place among the GOP hopefuls in the preznitential preliminaries. Through it all, he is, perhaps, kinder in his writing than he should be.
LOOKING OVER the field of potential Republican presidential candidates, one odd thing jumps out at me: Most of them have expressed deep hostility to the religious right's point of view in the past, and several of them are now insisting that they didn't mean a word of it.There is no way of looking at the front runners, Romney and McCain, without making them look bad. They were lying then or they are lying now. Neither one should be a socially or politically acceptable position for a president, conservative or otherwise.
One way to look at this is to conclude that they all said or did things they didn't mean, or that they have genuinely come around to the social conservative position. Oddly enough, this is the interpretation many social conservatives seem inclined to accept.
Or there's the other, more logical interpretation: The Republican Party's governing class is deeply hostile to social conservatism, and its leaders manage to fool the base over and over again.
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