The 2008 election will be remembered as a new chapter inscribed in the American journal, historic for two reasons. One is the remarkable candidacy of Barack Obama. The other, which will reveal itself over time, is less obvious but just as certain.
Like the ice sheet that has for so long covered the North Pole, the Republican Party is breaking up, melting in its own heat. The calving of Colin Powell last Sunday (and the ensuing conservative backlash) is the most recent signal that the GOP is in full disintegration mode.
This didn't begin with the defections among conservative media, but that's what got everyone's attention. Columnist Kathleen Parker started the food fight, writing that Sarah Palin was "out of her league", an opinion which attracted death threats to her e-mailbox.
If she was surprised, she shouldn't have been. Alarmed, maybe. Even so, David Brooks followed in her footsteps, labeling Palin a "cancer" on the Party. Bill Kristol, resident neo-con at the New York Times, publicly advised John McCain to "fire his campaign".
George Will said McCain made some Republicans "fearful". Opposition to the McCain-Palin ticket even cost Christopher Buckley his job at the National Review, the publication founded by his celebrated father. All of this indicates just how ruffled are the feathers of the right wing.
The splinter groups are easily identified, even personified in the field that ran in the GOP primary. Fiscal conservatives preferred Mitt Romney. Evangelicals backed Mike Huckabee. Rudy Giuliani was the favorite of the security/immigration crowd. Libertarians had Ron Paul. And Fred Thompson appealed to Law and Order conservatives.
With so many choices, and all the degrees of overlap, they settled on McCain because they felt he had the best chance to win (they apparently didn't realize their own responsibility in the matter). We're two weeks out and they remain divided, unsure, while Obama has opened a double-digit lead in the latest polls.
Scattershot, too, is the McCain campaign's message; now the Democrat is being painted as a Socialist. Last week he was a Terrorist. Before that he was an Elitist. By November 4th, he'll probably be a Communist, as well.
In the wake of George W. Bush, the rank and file have scrambled out from under the Big Tent that Ronald Reagan constructed three decades ago. Canvas and lumber, not to mention dreams of a permanent majority, lie trampled in dust. This is what happens when the clowns are allowed to run the circus.
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