More Terri Schiavos in our future?

Kevin Drum has already shown this great shift of white evangelicals to the Democratic Party is largely a myth. For instance, this story cites Catholics as having gone 55% to Democrats on Tuesday, but doesn't mention that's largely because of Hispanics (who, like most Hispanics, saw the Republican Party as the party of the Minutemen). Still, this is a promising conclusion.

As they contemplated the results, religious conservatives anticipated attacks by business interests and fiscal conservatives within the GOP who think the party should focus on budget deficits and Iraq -- and put less emphasis on culture-war issues such as opposing embryonic stem cell research and keeping Terri Schiavo on life support.

David Barton, head of WallBuilders, a Texas-based evangelical group, predicted that fiscal conservatives would cite California's Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a model.

"They will say, 'Schwarzenegger won and won big; the guys that lost are the social conservatives -- Hostettler, Ryun.' And so there's going to be a push within the Republican caucus to move further away from social conservatives," Barton said.

Even before the election, former House majority leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) called Dobson a "bully" who diverted the GOP from its core mission as the party of small government. On Wednesday, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said the GOP needs to become "a lot more progressive and a lot less ideological."

Despite the GOP's losses, conservative religious leaders gave no indication they plan to engage in the kind of introspection and repositioning that religious liberals did two years ago. And despite their anger at congressional Republicans, they did not suggest that they were about to abandon the GOP.

"Even though a lot of Democratic candidates talked about faith, and even though a lot of them are devout people who hold similar values, they are part of a party that is liberal," said Janice Shaw Crouse, director of Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute, a conservative Christian think tank. "So the only hope social conservatives really have is the Republican Party."

Frankly, I'm thrilled that the Dobsons of the world are not planning to "reposition" themselves. That means the Republican Party will continue to be in thrall to people who are so extreme and so far from the mainstream (and vice-versa). The Republican Party will continue to be the party that cares about what you do in your bedroom, but has no interest in science other than to condemn it.

But this also points to the fact that -- despite all this talk of the "muscular middle" -- politics is more polarized then ever before.