Ok, South Carolina is over and McCain has won, and Huckabee has come in second. But two items from ABC News caught my eye:
Preliminary exit poll results indicate that nearly seven in 10 Republican voters in the state are identifying themselves as conservatives, which is more than in the 2000 primary there, as well as more than in either Michigan or New Hampshire this year. (italics mine).
And this:
But Huckabee endured a notably broad level of rejection by nonevangelical voters: Just 12 percent of them voted for the Baptist minister vs. 40 percent for McCain, 21 percent for Romney and 15 percent for Fred Thompson. Huckabee's relative confinement in the evangelical and very conservative base is an issue for him down the road. (ABC News-2).
What this means is, for the moment anyway, the evangelicals are not voting in a bloc. Now, of course, I think they'll get behind whoever the GOP nominates, ultimately. But is it possible that they aren't seeing anyone out there who really floats their boat (not even Huckabee, a surprise) or, alternatively, that none of the GOP candidates out there has yet sold his soul to them?
I have to say that during the back to back debates on ABC the other week, Huckabee started waxing rhapsodic about the Declaration of Independence, and he went on to say:
...That sense that all of us have an essence of equality and that the primary purpose of a government is to recognize that those rights did not come from government, they came from God, they are to be protected, and then defined as the right to a life, the right to liberty -- our freedom -- to live our lives like we want to live them without government telling us how to do it. (ABC News-3)
At that point, my primary objective was to pose this question to him: "Well, Guv, when the Evangelicals start insisting on creationism and prayer in the schools, on banning abortion, on censoring books and movies, and so forth, are you going to stand by "our principles" or are you going to cave in like a mining disaster?" Obviously I couldn't do this.
Is it too much to hope, though, that the dark days of our theocracy and the reign of small-minded evangelical bigotry are nearly over?
Incidentally, Duncan Hunter dropped out before the votes were tallied (AP via Memeorandum).
Comments