Dividing and conquering

Obama always seems to have his eye on a bigger prize farther down the road than the rest of us. My suspicion is that he doesn't merely want to win the Presidency. He's working on dismantling the Republican party and, in the process, re-forming the Democratic constituency.

You Republicans have got three wings in your party: 1) the Evangelicals; 2) the hawks; and 3) the fiscal conservatives. It's sometimes an uncomfortable alliance and perhaps some of you would be willing to jettison yourselves from your counterparts.

There are signs that the evangelical block may be cracking up. Environmental concerns may have finally given at least some evangelicals a reason to peel away. I keep waiting for evangelicals to decide that following Jesus' teachings requires them to lean toward a governance philosophy that does not ignore the needs of the least fortunate. I mean, why do they sometimes want their government to reflect their beliefs (Ten Commandments in courthouses and organized prayer in schools and constitutional bans on gay marriage), but then don't demand it of tax/spending approaches? or of war policy in light of Jesus' prohibition against killing others (with no exception for self defense)? If they were truly consistent, they'd decide they need their own party. Until they do that, Obama is in a position to reach out to faith groups and start to persuade them to consider how believing in Jesus doesn't preclude them from voting for Democrats. He already threw them a bone with his anti-gay-marriage stance.

Obama, I predict, will make every effort to court the fiscal conservatives. For one thing, that really is his true bent; he might like to spend money in different places than Republican fiscal conservatives, and he may not have the same calibration for how much revenue should come from which parts of the payscale, but he is, I firmly believe, dedicated to achieving a balanced budget. My expectation, though, is that these differences aren't going to be anywhere near as huge as you're expecting them to be. He just isn't going to look anything like the Marx that you're anticipating. Balancing the budget, though, is not going to be possible in the next four years, in light of the current disastrous conditions. In fact, these conditions may warrant New Deal-ish spending that would not have been part of Obama's approach in ordinary times. But I think Republicans will be surprised at the degree to which he's a kindred spirit to the fiscal conservatives in their midst. And as a happy byproduct of this, there's the opportunity to divide the fiscal conservatives away from the hawk/god wingnuts who've been front/center for Bush.

If he gets elected, I expect that elections four and eight years from now, will have different lines of fissure, or at least the current lines will be fuzzier, than they have been for the past several elections.