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There's a new God gap growing - inside the GOP

BY DAN GILGOFF
SPECIAL TO NYDAILYNEWS.COM

Saturday, October 25th 2008, 6:42 PM

In the 2004 election, the pattern of religious voters supporting
George W. Bush and secular voters backing John Kerry was so stark that
it introduced a new term to the political lexicon: the God Gap. Exit
polls showed that the single best predictor of whether a voter
supported Bush or Kerry wasn't gender, income level or union
membership - it was how often that person went to church.

Four years later, a much different God Gap has emerged: between
religious conservatives and the secular establishment of the
Republican Party. It was the marriage of those two constituencies -
so-called country club Republicans and more down-market churchgoers -
that fueled a remarkable 25-year Republican ascent, from Ronald Reagan
to 1994's Republican Revolution to George W. Bush.

Today, the unraveling of the alliance is raising questions about the
party's ability to win the White House again.

Nothing has pointed up the rift as dramatically as Sarah Palin. It
wasn't until John McCain unveiled his vice presidential pick that
religious conservatives - excited by Palin's staunch anti-abortion
views, her personal decision to forego an abortion and give birth to a
son with Down syndrome, and her background in conservative Christian
churches - finally rallied to his side.

"I'm surprised and thrilled," Family Research Council Action political
chief Connie Mackey, who'd previously been critical of McCain, told me
on the day of the Palin announcement. "You know how politics works -
you don't usually get it all."

Across the country, in-the-pews religious conservatives were similarly
moved. A Pew poll found that weekly white Catholic churchgoers, who'd
been about evenly split between McCain and Barack Obama before the
Palin pick, got squarely behind McCain after. The same poll showed
that 71% of white evangelicals favored McCain after Palin joined his
ticket, up from 61% before. A whopping 78% of white evangelicals had a
favorable view of Palin in September, compared to 52% of the
electorate at large.

And yet in the weeks since, as many of these constituencies have
maintained their enthusiasm for the ticket, Palin has provoked a
remarkable string of denouncements and defections from leading lights
of the Republican establishment, from George Will to Peggy Noonan to
David Frum to Colin Powell.

It's not that those Republicans oppose Palin because of her
conservative, faith-based views on issues like abortion, though Powell
did bemoan the "rightward shift" that she represented. Rather, the
party's moderate, secular establishment is unmoved by the faith-based
bond that religious conservatives feel with her. And they fear that
McCain picked Palin to reap the electoral benefits of that bond,
ignoring her lack of experience and other political liabilities.

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It's an attitude that strikes many religious conservatives as elitist.
"There are some who've spoken condescendingly and forgotten about the
influence of social conservatives and their role in the party," Mathew
Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Council (a conservative
Christian legal group) and a zealous Palin supporter, told me. "Fiscal
conservatives need to understand that social conservatives are right
there with them and need to embrace them as allies."

The Republican rift over Palin is hardly the first sign that the
party's religious and establishment wings are drifting further apart.
President Bush's 2005 nomination of evangelical White House counsel
Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court thrilled the Christian Right -
Focus on the Family's James Dobson devoted a handful of his radio
shows to promoting her - before many of the same establishment figures
now lamenting Palin torpedoed Miers' nomination.

The rift emerged again in this year's Republican primaries. The bulk
of the party's evangelicals supported Mike Huckabee, giving him
victories in Iowa and five Southern states, while the establishment
went first for Romney and Giuliani, then McCain. There was no Bush- or
Reagan-like figure who united the two camps. Romney tried but failed.

Until the GOP finds another national candidate who can excite
religious conservatives and mainstream Republicans, the road to the
White House will be a steep uphill climb.

In the meantime, the McCain-Palin ticket has come to embody a house
divided, with McCain speaking to more secular Republicans and Palin
tending to the religious base. This week, while McCain campaigned in
swing states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, Palin was in the
capital of evangelical America, Colorado Springs,  talking on James
Dobson's radio program about the opposition she's facing because of
her faith-based politics.

Palin had a point. But the opposition that she, McCain, and the GOP
have to worry about isn't coming from liberals and the mainstream
media, as she and Dobson suggested on air. It's coming from their own
party.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/10/25/2008-10-25_theres_a_new_god_gap_growing__inside_the.html