The first campaign I worked for was the McGovern campaign. It wasn't much of a job, just putting flyers out. My campaign issue was the Vietnam war. One of my uncles had died in Vietnam, my father had done one tour of duty there and was getting ready to go for another. My other three uncles in the service had done a combined five tours and one was currently in theater.
The McGovern loss was a big wake-up call for the Democratic Party. They leaned too far to the left and McGovern didn't even carry his home state. For the last couple of months I've been seeing a similar parallel in this national election, but now, on the Republican side. Today, reading an article, I found someone else put it in far better words than I could:
The economy is irrelevant compared with religious identity. What this campaign may be doing is stripping most secular Republicans and independents from the GOP coalition. We could be left with a purely sectarian-Christianist rump, which will control the GOP for a generation. And McCain will have distilled Rove's religious coalition in eight weeks more effectively than Bush in eight years!
What we may be seeing is all the dangerous trends I identified in "The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom and the Future Of The Right" being brought to faster and more potent fruition by the combination of an economic crisis, a black Democratic candidate and a far-right Christianist unknown like Palin. It is as if the McCain-Palin campaign is acting as a purgative of moderate or centrist Republicanism in this atmosphere. What this could portend is that the GOP could become reduced to a George Wallace rump - even more than it now is. And from that scorched piece of earth, it will be much harder to recover in the short or medium run. Source
