The GOP religious right vs. the GOP establishment.
The blood is in the water. The game is afoot. And the Republicans are brawling.
While Democrats are usually viewed as the undisciplined, fractious party, it is Republicans who sharpen their knives and slice each up when the White House is at stake.
The struggle is between two groups within the GOP.
The establishment finally recognizes that the party must broaden its base. If the party appeals only to white, Christian conservatives, it will wind up as a regional party, capable of winning Senate and House seats but incapable of winning a national election.
We must nominate a presidential candidate who can reach across racial, religious, cultural, and ideological lines, the establishment says, and so the moderate middle is the place to be.
The far right of the party, especially the religious right, hears this and goes crazy. It says we keep nominating moderates and we keep losing! We nominate Mitt Romney and we lose. We nominate John McCain and we lose.
It is time to wake up and coalesce around a true Christian conservative who is unafraid to endorse Christian values and talk about God and Jesus Christ, it says. This is where America is and that is where the Republican Party needs to be.
The establishment has almost always won this fight, by the way. The religious right of the Republican Party has not gotten the nominee it has wanted since Ronald Reagan. (And he wasn’t religious personally.)
But this time could be different, the right says. Hillary Clinton is going to be very, very vulnerable in the general election. Voters have had eight years of a Democratic presidency and they are weary to the bone.
So this is the perfect time to pick a true conservative, a true Christian conservative, who will take this country back. This is no time to be muddling around in the middle, searching for moderate voters who will never vote Republican anyway.
And so the knives have come out.
As Trip Gabriel wrote in the New York Times on March 25: “Fearing that Republicans will ultimately nominate an establishment presidential candidate like Jeb Bush, leaders of the nation’s Christian right have mounted an ambitious effort to coalesce their support behind a single social-conservative contender months before the first primary votes are cast.”
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Originally Posted by Common Sense
