A Veneer of Certainty

In the past I’ve watched with amusement and dismay as Democratic candidates get raked over the ideological coals by various special-interest groups. Barack Obama for not being “black enough”, as a recent example. The expectation that a candidate should embody all the goals and rhetoric of a single group is ridiculous and has been behind the huge degree of the factionalizing seen in the Democratic party. Candidates with plans for the betterment of the majority are shot down or marginalized to make room for ones with appeal to the few. Now the right is experiencing the same turmoil and I’m pretty jazzed about it.

It used to be that Republicans had a one-stop-shopping style of candidacy. The party faithful would rally behind a single candidate that embodied the larger part of their political and social goals. That rule appears to no longer apply. Giuliani and McCain are perceived as too liberal, Romney is a flip-flopper, and the only candidates palatable to the social conservatives appear to have meager party-wide support. Combined with the internecine shouting match about the party’s pandering to evangelicals and loss of focus on fiscal conservatism and smaller government, it all is adding up to a kind of factionalizing that usually is attributed to the Democrats. In the end, I think it’s a good thing.

I tend to think that government works better when no single entity – ideological or social – has a lock. We all gain a measure of protection when a narrow agenda cannot be pushed into law. Lack of a mandate marginalizes the more extreme factions of a party as well as lobbying efforts by organizations that typically do not have at heart the best interests of the nation. The enactment of large pieces of legislation requires coalition-building, the result being something that not everyone is entirely comfortable with but is probably better for all concerned. Conversely, if the past few years have taught us anything, when one party has majority control then all restraints are off and you have uncontrolled spending, expansion of government and ideologically-biased meddling in social affairs.

So let the splintering on the right continue unabated and maybe we’ll get candidates that have a vision for almost everyone.

[Update: And the fracturing goes on. A letter sent to a recent meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals by some of that organization's luminaries decried the group's taking a stand on global warming. One signatory of the letter hinted at a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, even...

One of the men who signed the letter, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, said global warming was part of a leftist agenda that threatened evangelical unity.

"We're not going to allow third parties to divide evangelicals, and I think that is what is happening in part with the global warming issue," Perkins said.

But one of the board members, the Rev. Paul de Vries, said, "It ought to be God's agenda, not the Republican Party's agenda, that drives us.

"We're actually tired of being represented by people with a very narrow focus," he said. "We want to have a focus as big as God's focus."