Turns out the choice of Sarah Palin was not so courageous after all. According to today’s NYT report by Elisabeth Bumiller, McCain really wanted to go with one of his old pro-choice buddies, Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge, but then had to go eyeball-to-eyeball with James Dobson & Co. and blinked. It is tempting to see this as of a piece with other McCain performances: opposition to Bush taxes until the time comes to let them expire; opposition to torture until the time comes to carve out a loophole for the CIA. So faced with the threat of a floor fight, Bold John buckled: Agents of Intolerance 1, McCain 0. Or so I’d argue if I happened to be a partisan Democrat.
In all fairness, however, and contrary to the latest narratives, the fundamentals of American partisan politics remain pretty much as they gelled in the 1990s. White evangelicals are still the sine qua non Republican grassroots constituency. Even if you’re John McCain, you don’t mess with the Dobson. And that means sticking with an unreconstructed values agenda. Write all the stories you want about Rich Cizik and climate change, third-world debt, and AIDS in Africa. Globaloney! At the end of the day what counts is using abortion and the gay lifestyle and sex ed and evolution to draw a bright line between us and them.
From the standpoint of evangelical activism, Sarah Palin represents–or seemed to–the the next step in a rich tradition of female leadership, beginning with Anita Bryant in the 1970s and extending to Phyllis Schafly, Beverly LaHaye, and Roberta Combs, to name a few. Like the women volunteers who have kept Protestant churches going for a century and a half, activist women have been the crucial cogs in the GOP’s evangelical machine. When push comes to shove, even a maverick among men like John McCain knows he can’t do without them. Yes, Dear.