November 2008 Archives

Taking the opportunity on Politico to say What the GOP Needs to Do, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford offers his version of timeless Republican principles that must be returned to:

Some on the left will say our electoral losses are a repudiation of our principles of lower taxes, smaller government and individual liberty. But Election Day was not a rejection of those principles — in fact, cutting taxes and spending were important tenets of Barack Obama’s campaign.

Among the guilty pleasures of this post-election season is the contemplation of flagrantly mistaken predictions of how Barack Obama wouldn't, couldn't, shouldn't win first the Democratic primary and then the general election campaign (currently being collected by Andrew Sullivan under his running "Von Hoffman Award" head). Such stuff from campaign insiders like Mark Penn is to be expected, but academic experts should know better, no? No. Or at least not if they've hitched their wagon to, say, the Clintons--like Princeton historian Sean Wilenz. Wilenz, who emerged from the Groves of Nassau to assail Bill Clinton's impeachers a decade ago, raged against Obamania for much of the election season, prognosticated its failure, and now can't bring himself to own up to his cloudiness of vision. Another intellectual type is well represented by Daniel Pipes, a sometime college friend whom I mortally offended after 9/11by suggesting that his heated warnings that American Muslims posed a threat to American civil liberties bore some resemblance to 19th-century Protestant anxieties about Catholic Power. Like Ahab, Pipes has been obsessively on the trail of the Great Black Politician, seeking to prove that Obama is a sometime Muslim, a radical, a deceiver up to his eyeballs in guilty associations. Like Ahab's, his quest just seems to get crazier and crazier. Sirhan Sirhan?

The difficulty that intellectuals have letting go of their idées fixes is nicely explained in a letter (published in the current New York Review, but behind the firewall) sent by the great art historian Meyer Schapiro to his wife-to-be, when he was just 22, studying Romanesque sculpture in Spanish monasteries for his doctoral dissertation.

A Canon who has studied San Isidoro [in León] for many years contradicted my notions flatly & with great conviction--He thought I would agree with him--for others had been converted--Ideas, if professionalized, become precious personal property--: a decline in value produces serious emotions: I could think of nothing else for several hours.

Another candidate for RNC chairman, South Carolina party chair Katon Dawson, has posted his manifesto, which includes the following call:

Renew our commitment to our Party’s timeless principles…by reconfirming our commitment to be the party of smaller government, lower taxes, individual freedom, strong national security, respect for the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, the importance of family and the exceptionalism of America.

George Bush—through the beheadings, the kidnappings, Abu Ghraib, the hysteria of a Richard Clark, Joe Wilson, Anonymous, Rathergate, the 9/11 Commission, CIA rogue analysts, cheap European slurs, insane remarks from Walter Cronkite to Bill Moyers, and last-minute media fabricated "scandals"—has never faltered, so confident was he in the exceptionalism of America and the unshakeable resolve and competence of the U.S. military.

Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country. This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America. We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism.

Thanksgiving felicitations to all!

Rick Hertzberg gives the LDS Church a pop in the current New Yorker, but the big news is that the state of California's Fair Political Practices Commission is investigating the church for allegedly neglecting to report "a battery of nonmonetary contributions — including phone banks, a Web site and commercials" in its effort to drum up support for Proposition 8. A California law whose constitutionality the state Supreme Court will be reviewing requires full disclosure of any money spent and services rendered to influence the outcome of an election campaign. Jay Sekulow, legal eagle for the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, doesn't like the law one bit. As CBN reports:

"These weren't campaigns like a political campaign, like someone running for office," Sekulow said. "This was on a moral issue and a cultural issue, and I think the church should be free to engage in these issues and not have to engage in oversight by the government when it comes to this."

"Now the law in California may be different and maybe needs to be challenged in that regard. I think it does need to be challenged," he explained. "But this idea that the government can oversee how the church spends its money is in my view absolutely unconstitutional."

As the investigation goes forward--and the LDS Church says it will cooperate--the full extent of the church's involvement in the pro-Prop. 8 campaign will presumably be laid out for all to see. Not, I suspect, a happy prospect in Salt Lake.

Update: But the Catholic bishops have their back. I guess.

What to make of the Recipe for Republican Recovery advanced today on Politico by Michael Steele, the former Maryland lieutenant governor who wants to be RNC chair? Here's the nut:

Ronald Reagan spoke to our deepest longing as a people. He gave a voice to principles that are true for all people in all times. Retool our message, but base it on those proven conservative principles for which our party has always stood: Our freedom is from God, not government. Our prosperity comes from a free people in a free market, not overtaxing, free-spending bureaucrats. We celebrate and protect life, born and unborn. And our best hope for a brighter future is in the empowerment of individuals and families, not in the constraints imposed by a bloated bureaucracy.

The battle for the future of the Republican Party seems to be shaping up as Ecocons vying with Neocons for the support of Theocons. Whom do the Theocons go with? I'm guessing there will be two camps--call them the Premills and the Postmills. The Premills favor that End Times apocalypticism that keeps them focused on the Middle East and draws them to the Neocons. Put Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham and Rod Parsley and John Hagee in that camp. The Postmills tend to be focused more on making America safe for God and capitalism, such that they are drawn to the Ecocons. They are the camp of James Dobson and Richard Land and, at the end of the day, Mike Huckabee. The big question: Which side wins the hand of Sarah Palin?

The McCain-Palin campaign was Neocon-Theocon. My money's on Theocon-Ecocon next time around.

Various people have been trying to figure out why various conservative Catholic bishops and associated lay eminences seem to have gone off their meds since the election. Writing in Slate, Melinda Henneberger puts it down to anxieties over the Freedom of Choice Act, a piece of legislation beloved of the pro-choice left that would (presumably) roll back all abortion restrictions to the day after Roe v. Wade. Barack Obama, perhaps in full pander mode, once told Planned Parenthood he would sign it if it ever came to his desk. Joe Feuerherd of the National Catholic Reporter contends that it'll never happen, and ubiquitous Catholic blogger David Gibson agrees, claiming that FOCA is nothing more than a politically useful red herring for the conservatives.

Well, OK, but does that mean all the hysteria is just for show? As in Cardinal Stafford's invocation of an imminent Gethsemane? Or George Weigel's denunciation of Catholic "tribal" voting as "immoral" and "stupid"? Steve Waldman usefully points out that Catholic voting has shifted back and forth between the parties, thereby indicating that it is actually based on something other than ancient habit. One might also contemplate in particular all those relatively recently arrived Latino Catholics, whose overwhelming preference for the Democratic Party is not old enough to be considered tribal.

So what's really up? I'd say it is some combination of disappointed hopes--oh, for that one additional Supreme Court justice!--and a sense that their church is sliding away from them. It's all well and good to tell yourself that you don't want all those Cafeteria Catholics, until you realize that just about all your folks are in the cafeteria. The idea of slimming down The Church to a small remnant of the faithful lacks appeal when you actually start thinking about what that would mean. In short, the rage of the bishops seems like nothing so much as the rage of the impotent.

This, from Lauren Collins' interview with Mike Huckabee in the current New Yorker, is worth pondering:

While some of Huckabee’s gripes come off as rinky-dink—in the book, he admonishes Romney for hogging golf-cart parking spaces during the Iowa straw poll—others are more stinging. Asked about Sarah Palin, he responded, “She, uh, was an appropriate choice, because she put John McCain back in the game.” That was the get-along answer, but a few minutes later the new, aggrieved Huckabee resurfaced. He recalled, “It was funny that all through the primary—I mean literally up until McCain got enough delegates to win—people said, ‘You know, Huckabee’s really running for Vice-President. Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ And from that day forward, when I actually was no longer running for President, nobody ever said, ‘Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ ” Neither was he quite so unperturbed by the Palin pick: “I was scratching my head, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.’ It wasn’t so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn’t prepared.”

My guess is that none of the GOP powers-that-be trusted him to be their Highnesses' dog at Kew. ("I am His Highness' dog at Kew/ Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?") He'd called the Club for Growth the Club for Greed, and was never willing to play the government-is-always-the-problem card. He was soft on immigration. He was, or seemed to be, a reluctant culture warrior. He appeared to have no appetite for remaking the world in our image. And his ability of garner votes owed nothing to their support. In a word, he seemed far too independent for a party always in search of the front man, be it Reagan or Quayle or George W. Bush. Under the largely spurious guise of reformer, Palin fit the role perfectly. Sorry, Huck, you didn't.

Peggy Stack has, as usual, the best take on matters Mormon, this time (notwithstanding comments from me) concerning the fallout from Prop. 8. A possible silver lining for the LDS Church is enhanced street cred with evangelicals, as in the following quote from the Rev. Jim Garlow, one of its pro-Prop. 8 partners in California:

Last week, Garlow, of Skyline Church in San Diego, was so outraged by the protests against Mormons that he e-mailed 7,200 California pastors urging them to "speak boldly" in defense of the LDS role in passing Proposition 8.

"We were not going to stand by and be silent while there was anti-Mormonism in the streets," Garlow said Friday. "Our theological differences with Mormonism are, frankly, unbridgeable, but these are our friends and neighbors and attacks on them are unacceptable."

The Proposition 8 campaign deepened his relationship with Mormons, he said, and the protests have solidified it.

Update: The upside and downside for Romney.

Uh-oh. Politico's Martin and Lee have been tracking President-elect Obama's post-election church attendance record and found it wanting. It seems that since the election, BO has been more attentive to his body than his soul Sunday mornings. Could it be that, like the majority of the people who voted for him, he is a bit, ah, episodic in his churchgoing?

Meanwhile, Time's Amy Sullivan and WaPo's Salmon and Boorstein have been canvassing the territory for a good church for the Obamas to attend. The irrepressible Sally Quinn plumps for that Episcopalian pile called the National Cathedral--thereby earning jeers from GetReligion's Douglas LeBlanc.

LeBlanc in particularly annoyed at Quinn's emphasis on the National Cathedral's inclusivity--which, she avers, accords well with a widely quoted remark of Obama's that we are no longer just a Christian country but a Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. one as well:

Obama’s words are an apt description of the United States in the 21st century. Applying those words to a Christian cathedral is an act of theological incoherence. Even if the President-elect believes that pluralism is the most important factor in choosing his family’s church, he deserves a more spiritually informed invitation than Quinn offers.

It should also be noted that Obama's own inclusivity goes beyond mere description of the country's religious diversity. As he told Cathleen Falsani in that 2004 interview, "I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell." So on those theological grounds, it's just possible that the National Cathedral would work for him and his family. But there are plenty of other reasons to think that it wouldn't.

I'm betting a nickel that the Obama administration is going to jump into the Israeli-Palestinian situation soon after taking office. The new president has more street cred with the Muslim/Islamic world than any president in history. He's coming off a huge Jewish vote in the election and has got Rahm Emanuel, Joe Biden, and maybe Hillary Clinton to reassure the Israelis. Neither side can string things out, knowing that this particular presidency is coming to an end in a few months. AIPAC will be in its cuddle-up-to-the-new-administration mode. Hell, Joe Lieberman is on the reservation and will owe the president big time. And there's no great mystery about what needs to happen. What Scowcroft and Brzezinski say in today's WaPo, Former Israeli prime minister Olmert has recently said as well. It's high stakes work, to be sure, but a great way to spike the talking points of Al Qaeda and Ahmadinejad. In an administration that now seems like a galaxy far, far away, it used to be said that the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad. What if the roads to Tehran and Tora Bora run through Jerusalem?

Concluding Social Scientific Postscript: Four months ago, I took a little pop at a poll by the new, center-left Jewish lobby J Street, accusing it of asking too many questions in ways that would generate the kinds of answers the served J Street's point of view. Now comes the center-right Jewish lobby The Israel Project with a poll that, surprise of surprises, does the same thing. Specifically, it highlights Americans' support for Israelis as opposed to Palestinians, and desire that Iran not acquire nuclear weapons. And, with the shoe on the other foot, J Street's director, Jeremy Ben Ami, declared:

Why does the Israel Project insist on asking Americans to choose sides between the Israelis and the Palestinians in a conflict that the United States is uniquely positioned to help resolve?

The right question is what percent of Americans support active U.S. leadership to resolve the conflict in order to provide both sides with security and peace. Perhaps knowing that that number would have been above 80 percent, the Israel Project chose not to ask that question.

Similarly on Iran, the Israel Project’s questions are constructed to build the case for confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. It’s about as surprising to learn that Americans want to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as it would be to learn that they want to lower unemployment. The real surprise, that the Israel Project avoids revealing with its polling, is that Americans are willing to engage with Iran diplomatically to address the threat. Again, knowing the overwhelming public support for diplomacy, it seems the Israel Project prefers to ask only questions that further its agenda rather than to examine real public opinion on the complex challenges facing the U.S. in the Middle East.”

Some years ago, the economist Alice Rivlin dismissed this kind of duel as "forensic social science," and it is the characteristic mode of policy research inside the Beltway. Advocacy is all well and good, but it would be nice if the forensics could be leavened a little more often with some disinterested search for truth. It's more honest, it results in more useful findings, and it might even enhance the advocates' credibility.

Courtesy RNS.

In its just released overview of news coverage of religion in the campaign, Pew ranks "Palin Family/Personal Issues" as the biggest religion story of the campaign after Obama's alleged Muslim identity, consuming fully 25 percent of religion-related campaign coverage. In late September, a Pew report noted "the relative lack of attention to Palin's religious biography within the mainstream media," and nothing happened afterward to require altering that assessment. For those disposed to assail the MSM for inattention to religion, this is a pretty good case in point. Not that it was an easy story to get. I'm convinced that Palin, aided and abetted by her handlers, engaged in a conscious occultation of her religious beliefs and commitments. But journalists often dig out things public figures try to hide. The most charitable view I can summon is that in this case they began to feel that the truth might be sufficiently disturbing as to suggest that Palin ought not occupy the second highest office in the land. But doesn't the Constitution forbid religious tests for office? So let's not go there, and hope we never have to deal with the possibility. In the end, they didn't.

A lively discussion took place yesterday in the upper reaches of the blogosphere in response to Kathleen Parker's rant against the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, in the course of which Marc Ambinder asked whether there is any actual evidence out there to suggest that suburban independents declined to vote Republican because of Palin-inspired concern about the influence of conservative evangelicals in the party. What the survey data show, he notes, is concern about her readiness to handle the job, not about her religion.

It's a fair question, and it is at least arguable that had Palin demonstrated a greater command of the issues, a significant number of those Democratic-voting suburban independents would have gone with McCain. The problem is that, so far as I know, pre-election polling didn't ask potential voters what they felt about Palin's religion; they were asked whether they thought the candidates on the national tickets were ready to be president, and she came up short. The evidence that Palin's religion was a problem is (beyond the anecdotal) indirect. Here's how I'd lay it out.

1. Palin's identity as an evangelical and a strong social conservative was well known, as was her strong appeal to the evangelical/social conservative base of the Republican Party.

2. When it comes to evangelicals, voting patterns show sharp divisions, not only between Republicans and Democrats but within Republican ranks. In the Republican primaries this year, the strong evangelical preference for Huckabee was widely recognized, but there was also a strong disinclination for other primary voters to vote for him. Non-evangelical Christians, and Catholics in particular, stayed away from Huckabee in droves.

3. There is clear evidence of strong anti-evangelical sentiment in parts of the American public. For example, in a recent study, 53 percent of faculty members at colleges and universities admitted to negative views of evangelicals. The next highest ranking were Mormons, at 33 percent. Catholics came in at 13 percent and Jews, the lowest, at 3 percent.

4. Palin's readiness on the stump to divide the country into real and unreal America cannot but have helped turn away suburban independents. As she presented it, the real America is the America of (among other things) religion. Readiness for the presidency was not an issue here.

While this evidence is plenty suggestive, it is far from determinative. It would, therefore, be good to have some post-election surveying that sought to identify the sources of anti-Palinism more directly.

Here's the lede to Adelle M. Banks' RNS story on Mike Huckabee's news conference today:

Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, often mentioned as someone who could shepherd the GOP out of the political wilderness, says Republicans neglected religious conservatives this year and need to maintain their support as the party regroups.

"They were welcomed to the family table two days a year, and that was the primary and Election Day," the former Arkansas governor said at a press conference Wednesday (Nov. 19). "I think there's a point of frustration and exasperation where people are saying. `You know what? If you don't want us, just say so."

Kathleen Parker, one of the conservative recusants who balked at following Sarah Palin into the wilderness, now makes so bold as to suggest that G-O-D is the big problem for the G-O-P. That is, the party's problem is that it's wedded itself to a base of married white people who believe in carrying their religious vision into the public square. She doesn't get all her facts right--for example, non-observant American twenty-somethings do tend to take up religion later in life--and there's more than a whiff of the old WaPo "poor, uneducated and easy to command" in her dismissal of the "lowest of brows." But the burden of her critique, that the old moral majority is now a shrinking minority, will be harder to wave away.

Actually, the so-called leaders of the Republican base are, it seems to me, well aware of the problem. That's why they balked at embracing Mike Huckabee's upstart campaign a year ago. In his new book, Huck has choice words for a number of them and, so far as I can tell from the quoted excerpts, almost acknowledges the problem. Rather than acting as true believers, they cared too much about, well, winning the election. Sarah Palin swept them away, but waking up in the clear light of post-election reality, even they are likely to find her a rather less attractive repository for their hopes and dreams than they imagined the night before.

I'm with McEnroe on Connecticut's junior senator. During the campaign, the man was a shonda for the goyim. But I have an idea. Come January, Congress and the Obama administration should get rid of the monstrosity that is the Department of Homeland Security. Let its parts revert to what they were, the whole having turned out to be less than their sum. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security will thereby be rendered null and void, and with it its chairman.

We'll have to see if there is any significance to Focus on Family laying off 18 percent of its workforce beyond the state of the economy. CW holds that social movement organizations like Focus have an easier time raising money when their guys are out of power. The most one can say is that Dobson isn't betting on it. Meanwhile, the chair apparent of the Ohio Republican Party, Kevin DeWine, has created something of a firestorm by suggesting that his party needs to dial back on the social issues if it wants to recover its state and national footing.

Two days after the election, DeWine said, "We have to exchange a fiscal message and an economic message in for the social message that has dominated the messaging of this party for the past decade." This drew howls of protest from social conservative leaders who not long ago were the ascendant power in the state GOP. DeWine tried to calm the waters a bit, in which effort he was not exactly joined by the party's outgoing chair, who today blasted DeWine's chief critic for her “divisive and destructive behavior.” Stay tuned.

How likely is this debate to be engaged in other state Republican parties? I'm not in a position to say exactly. But it's at that level, and not among the national yakkers, that the contest for the future of the GOP will be joined in earnest. The internal pushback against social conservatism will come, I expect, in those states where the fire and brimstone ended up burning the perpetrators. That happened in Ohio. Where else?

Social conservatives + Neocons - Club for Growth = GOP success. So saith Kristol.

It's hard to imagine that Mainline Protestantism, however exactly conceived, won't have more of a talking presence in and around the Obama administration than it has had during the Bush dispensation. Barack Obama's own religious beliefs and values seem to me to be as mainline as they come. In this regard, the Christian Century uses a somewhat odd locution in reporting the good wishes extended to Obama from mainline denominations:

Continued pastoral support to the Obama family was offered by the top executive of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that the Illinois senator was aligned with until he broke with Chicago's Trinity UCC over inflammatory remarks by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

In her many post-election interviews, has anyone engaged Sarah Palin in a discussion of her religious identity and beliefs?

It is no small irony that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should now be the object of nationwide ire for exercising its ecclesiastical power on behalf of "traditional" marriage. Once upon a time, the church looked to the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm the right of its members to practice marriage according to their own distinctive lights, and had Reynolds v. U.S. gone the other way in 1878, there's every reason to think that Mormons in good standing would still be committing themselves to bonds of plural matrimony. In the gay marriage wars of the past few years, a standard rhetorical question of many opponents has been that if same-sex marriage is allowed, can polygamy be far behind? You wonder how often that question was voiced by the rank-and-file Mormons canvassing last month on behalf of Proposition 8.

In a conversation Friday, Peggy Fletcher Stack, the longtime Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter who has probably written more stories about the LDS Church than any journalist alive, allowed as how this had not been a very good season for a church that's highly sensitive to its public image. First there was the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, which roiled the evangelical dovecotes. Then there was the assault on the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas that, if it hardly proved a big win for the Texas authorities, served as yet another reminder of Mormon polygamy to a public that may not distinguish too sharply between fundamentalist Mormons and their mainstream cousins. And finally this.

This, of course, the church brought entirely on itself. To be sure, it was part of a coalition of religious institutions promoting Prop. 8, and there's doubtless a temptation to ask why the much more numerous Catholics and evangelicals haven't drawn the bulk of the attention. That's got to be ingrained anti-Mormon prejudice, no? Maybe but maybe not. As we know from the election returns, most Catholics don't pay much attention to what their bishops say when it comes to voting, and as for evangelicals, there's no hierarchy that presumes to tell them what to do. It's a different story when the LDS Church sends out instructions.

There was a lot of shouting yesterday about the need to separate church and state, but under the law religious institutions, like other non-profits, are entitled to advocate for issues they care about without putting their tax exemptions at risk. What they shouldn't expect to avoid is denunciation and vilification from the other side. As the marriage wars continue, it will be interesting to see whether the famously nice folks in Temple Square decide to make nice or to double down.

On the strength of a post-election Faith in Public Life survey, Jim Wallis makes so bold as to claim (in a conference call today) that a new faith coalition is in the offing. It will be led by blacks and Latinos, and will include young and moderate evangelicals, progressive Catholics, mainline Protestants, and miscellaneous others. It will not be a religious left, and certainly not of the right, and more inclusive than a center. As the late Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko described his own ideology, Mobutuism: ni à droite, ni à gauche, ni même au centre. Call it the Grand Coalition of the Common Good.

What in the survey would justify such a conclusion? It's that religious folks across the spectrum seem to say yes to an agenda broader than just abortion and gay marriage. And that while it found only 21 percent of white evangelicals who said they voted for Barack Obama (five points lower than the exit polls showed), 39 percent said they felt he shared their values. Well, if that's a coalition, it isn't an electoral one. What it shows, perhaps, is a widespread readiness on the part of Americans to go along with, and maybe even get enthusiastic about, poverty reduction and abortion reduction and environmental protection and other good stuff.

The only thing that could bust up such a coalition, it seems, is if a brand-new Obama administration decided to get behind the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), a piece of federal legislation that would seemingly roll back the many and varied abortion restrictions imposed by the states (with Supreme Court permission) since Roe v. Wade--and which Obama has said he would sign. Catholic bishops and leaders of the religious right are working themselves up into a lather about FOCA. It is to be presumed that the incoming Obama administration has no intention of letting that political and jurisprudential can of worms be opened.

Christie Todd Whitman, who spent a couple of unhappy years as head of George W. Bush's EPA, makes the case for the GOP moving away from what she calls "social fundamentalism" in today's WaPo. As she points out, she was hooted down by the party faithful when she made the case in a book, It's My Party Too, four years ago. It will be interesting to see what happens this time around.

Though you'd think, after the defeats of 2006 and 2008, the reception would be friendlier, I'll believe it when I see it. Together with former Missouri senator John Danforth (another critic of social conservatives), Whitman heads the Republican Leadership Council, an exercise in party moderation modeled on the Democratic Leadership Council, which played a significant role in dragging the Democratic Party into the political center (see Clinton, Bill). The RLC, which doesn't seem even to have volunteer leaders in most states, has a long way to go if it's to match its counterpart. Its stands for fiscal conservatism and a strong defense are anodyne; where it departs from party orthodoxy is in its support for environmentalism and call for "Less government interference in individual lives." One of the founders was former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele, now chairman of GOPAC, the conservative political action committee that was once Newt Gingrich's party-building fiefdom. Steele has announced his candidacy for chair of the Republican National Committee. If elected, will he remember his old moderate co-conspirators?

On dotCommonweal, David Gibson has a pithy summation of where the Catholics bishops came down and where they didn't. I'm feeling in need of a good history of the bishops' public positioning on abortion since Roe v. Wade was handed down. It's been 35 years; the Church's position has not changed; the position of the American electorate has not changed; the position of American Catholics is stable; and the number of abortions is in decline; and yet never have the bishops seemed more agitated. It doesn't seem as if there's some new wind blowing from Rome; the word I get is that there's less agita about abortion and the American political order in the Vatican than there is in the American episcopate. So what gives?

The best answer that I can summon at the moment is that what's going on has to do with the internal dynamics of the USCCB. John Allen reports that abortion hardliners largely lost out to moderate in voting on committee chairmanships. So it seems that for the moment, those best described as moderates rule the roost. But the conservatives are restless. Very.

Update: OK, I've found such a history. It's "The Politics of the U.S. Catholic Bishops: The Centrality of Abortion" by Margaret Ross Sammon, in a new collection of essays edited by Kristin E,. Heyer, Mark J. Rozell, and Michael A Genovese entitled Catholics and Politics: The Dynamic Tension Between Faith & Power, from Georgetown UP. It's useful not only in tracing the trajectory of the bishops' engagement in politics via abortion but also in providing a context for viewing the current contention over the bishops' document on Faithful Citizenship. That document is essentially a continuation of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's idea of placing abortion within a "consistent ethic of life"--thereby, among other things, reducing abortion's salience. Abortion hard-liners didn't like Bernardin's approach then, and they don't like Faithful Citizenship now (even though they voted for it last year).

Amy Sullivan's got a good account of Obama and the evangelical vote that gives the campaign a smack or two for not getting its outreach act together sooner. Pastordan is not persuaded that more or better outreach was in order, and given the outcome, it's hard to argue too much with that. My sense is that the Obamaites could have had a bigger impact on evangelicals (and white Catholics) without a much greater expenditure of resources. But the might-have-beens are hard to figure. What's certain is that in places like Georgia, where indigenous evangelical political networks are well established, it was possible to turn them out for McCain. And I've no doubt they'll be turned out as well for Saxby Chambliss in his senatorial runoff. Mike Huckabee, who nudged out John McCain to capture the primary, will be there campaigning among the churchfolk on Sunday.

Glumly meeting in the now blue state of Florida, the GOP governors are long on distress but, on WaPo's account, short on solutions, with nary a peep about dialing back on the social conservatism. Meanwhile, over at the liberal blog MyDD, desmoinesdem calls attention to this Des Moines Register op-ed, wherein former Republican gubernatorial hopeful, lt. gov. nominee, and Huckabee state chairman Bob Vander Plaats asserts that the only way back for the state (and national) GOP is to hew to the old straight-and-narrow:

We have followed the misguided advice of "experts" to abandon our principles and move to the middle so we can supposedly win. In essence, we have become "lukewarm" on life, on marriage, on the Second Amendment, on limited government, on balanced budgets, on lower taxes, on parental rights in educating and raising children, on faith, on family and on freedom. The net result is that voters have spit us out of their mouths.

Let me sharpen the point with respect to the GOP's religion problem--what we might call the Godless Gap. In the 2008 election polls, voters were divided according to reported worship attendance into five categories: more than weekly (12 %); weekly (27 %); monthly (15%); a few times a year (28%); and never (16%). Forget about the monthly attenders, whom Obama won 53-46 but who are the most likely to shift back and forth. (In 2004, Bush won them 50-49.) That leaves the most frequent attenders, who voted for McCain 55-43, and the least frequent, who voted for Obama 62-36. In a nutshell, the GOP God Gap was 12 points, down from 20 in the past two presidential elections and less than half the size of the Democrats' Godless Gap. And note, the least frequent attenders are five points more numerous than the most frequent. So how, exactly, do the Republicans get ahead by clinging to the old time religion?

Waldman's got the entire transcript of the Cathleen Falsani's 2004 interview with Barack Obama on his faith. I can't think of another future American president who spoke to a reporter at such length about his religious views. Perhaps the closest would be Robert Scheer's September 1976 interview of Jimmy Carter in Playboy. Here's the notorious excerpt from that one:

Because I'm just human and I'm tempted and Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. The Bible says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Christ said, I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery. I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times.... This is something that God recognizes, that I will do and have done, and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock. Christ says, don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife. The guy who's loyal to his wife ought not to be condescending or proud because of the relative degree of sinfulness.

What to say to a prophet seeking access.

"I can't predict what's going to happen a day from now, much less four years from now. You know, I have -- faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator's hands -- this is what I always do. I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it's cracked up a little bit, maybe I'll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don't let me miss an open door. And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door." (Sarah to Greta)

A few days ago WaPo's Michelle Boorstein and Jacqueline Salmon had a good piece on what the Obama administration may do with respect to faith-based social service funding. I have it on pretty good authority that there will in fact be an office of faith-based and community service in the Obama White House--though whether it will be called that I don't know. Boorstein and Salmon rightly call attention to the issue of employment, on which the Bush initiative foundered, at least in Congress. Obama's position has been not to support the kind of waiver of anti-discrimination laws that the Bush White House has gone in for.

Obama said this summer that he would not allow religious groups to get federal funding if they discriminate in hiring. But evangelicals close to the Obama team say they are getting signals that the door might still be open to changes. Being required to hire non-Christians would be a deal-breaker even for progressive evangelicals, they say.

Streetprophets' Pastordan has been running a series of posts on "Things That Aren't Actually Right About Faith & Politics In The 2008 Election" in which he takes after various other commentators (not me, yet) for various comments, assessments, and pronunciamentos about religion and the campaign. It's nice to see him back to his old unreconstructed curmudgeonly self, and I think he's largely right to boot. I do have a few annotations and amplifications to offer.

1. Contra Berlinerblau, he's certainly right that the Obama campaign didn't have to worry at all about scaring off the secularists. Where else were they going to go? I'd just add that the Democratic Party, even at its most intensely secularist, has always made a place for religion--as a black thing. Obama got an automatic pass from the secularist base because he's, well, black.

2. OK, so Barack Obama is not now a member of the United Church of Christ. Since withdrawing the hem of his garment from Trinity U.C.C. he is a member of no church. He said he'd find a new one after the election, so we'll have to wait. Still, this most liberal of mainline Protestant denominations is the only one he's ever belonged to, and if there's any way to characterize him religiously, it's as a U.C.C.-type mainline Protestant--in his theology, his social views, his understanding of church and state. What about Jeremiah Wright's much bruited black liberation theology? That's hardly at odds with the denomination of which Trinity U.C.C. is a part. Afrocentrism is a dimension of the Protestant mainline. Where, after all, has James Cone taught all these years?

3. Mean as it is to call Steve Waldman a "Hierowanker," it's important to recognize that the Obama campaign's opening to the pro-life community was pretty modest. They were given a seat at the table to negotiate a revised abortion plank, but came away with less than they wanted. That a few prominent pro-life Catholics were prepared to go along says more about them than about any change of position on the part of the Democrats. Steve, like Amy Sullivan and E.J. Dionne, sometimes lets an eagerness to have the Democratic Party desecularize itself (or at least appeal to moderate-to-conservative "people of faith") outrun the facts. And the fact is that the religious outreach of the Obama campaign was not equal to the hype. That said, there can be no question that the invitations extended to religious voters by the DNC and both the Clinton and Obama campaigns were something new--particularly if you contrast them with the GOP's complete indifference to the religiously indifferent and lukewarm beyond its base. Does anyone remember the Republican Big Tent?

Anyone interested in following the Catholics bishops' viewpoints on abortion and politics should check into Daniel Burke's postings on the Religion News Service blog. To me, by far the most interesting quote thus far comes from Washington, D.C. archbishop Donald Wuerl, who is what passes for a liberal on the subject these days. Here's his response to a question about denying communion to Vice President-elect Biden:

We have always taken the position of the majority of the bishops -- that we present the teachings of the Church and the expectations on one's conscience, and it's up to the individual to make the judgement about their worthiness to receive Communion. As a conference we have (produced) a number of documents that detail just how significant receiving Communion is, and today we are very conscious of the fact that there is scrutiny of public figures, and so they have to be aware of their actions and obligations in the public forum.

From the Jewish Week's election wrap-up:

“Neo-cons will be under a huge amount of pressure in the Republican party now,” said law professor and GOP activist [Marshall] Breger, who predicted a major battle between GOP factions over the future of the party.

With their focus on a muscular and interventionist U.S. foreign policy and hawkish support for Israel, neoconservative factions will face off against more traditional conservatives who want to return the party to its small-government, non-interventionist past, he said.

The religious right faction, possibly rallying around Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, also will seek dominance in the wake of the vote.

“It will be a bloodletting,” Breger said.

When I started up this blog a year ago, the idea was to do a time-limited experiment. A few academics, students of religion and politics chosen for expertise in different areas, would comment more or less regularly on religion and the campaign, for the campaign's duration. It didn't quite work out that way. I did sign up some co-conspirators, but for reasons best known to them, they didn't prove to be very interested in participated in what, I guess, was pretty clearly my show. I can't say I blame them. The blog quickly established itself as one of those quick-reaction affairs, staying as close to the news cycle as it could, given the constraints of time and energy. The sensibility was journalistic, reflecting my own years as an editorial writer and columnist. Academics tend to march to a deliberate beat. After a while, I stopped bugging the others to post. I faced up to its being an expression of my own interests, values, sensibility, and prejudices. With the help of one or another of the Greenberg Center's undergraduate fellows, I've done it alone.

What to do now that the campaign's over? While recognizing that I may simply be suffering from the withdrawal symptoms currently being satirized in Doonesbury, I've decided not to hang up my links and retire from the field. I've had too much fun doing it, derive too much narcissistic pleasure from doing it, and have at least some reason to think that there's enough of an audience interested in my doing it. (If there are those who wish to send me their yea or nay, I'd be more than happy to hear from them, at mark.silk@trincoll.edu.) So for a while at least, Spiritual Politics will be continuing, with a subhead to indicate that its subject will now be religion and American political culture generally, or some such thing. We'll let the sometime co-conspirators gracefully exit the masthead, and arrange a redesign that will, I hope, improve upon the slapped-together look we have, and provide some of the usual accouterments of blogs, such as lists of other relevant websites and a blogroll. I don't expect to be posting as frequently. Certainly there will be less of what Steve Waldman calls poll candy, which leaves some with a bad taste in their mouths anyway. Otherwise, we'll see how it goes.

In the Middle Ages, it became conventional to speak of the three "orders" of society: those who fought, those who prayed, and those who worked the land. That was to say: the nobility, the religious (monks and secular clergy), and the peasants. The first two had the power and the pelf, but they couldn't do their things without the labor of the third. And so it is with the three orders of the Republican Party, which (it has become conventional to say) consists of the economic conservatives (those who prey), the foreign policy conservatives (those who pontificate), and the social conservatives (those who pray). The first two are strong in dollars and decibels, but weak in numbers. The third has the boots on the ground and in the voting booth. They are the party's "base"--which is to say, they have to be kept happy, active, and on the desmesne in order for the first two orders to be able to their things in Washington and in statehouses around the country.

It is not true that this base is, as the Washington Post once notoriously put it, "poor, uneducated, and easy to command." Social conservatives are middle class, college educated, and from time to time prepared to rise up and take matters into their own hands. During the primaries, they decided to follow Mike Huckabee, one of their own, rather than take orders from their so-called leaders to cleave to a Fred Thompson or a Mitt Romney. Then, grumpy and restive when the GOP nomination landed by default on John McCain, they had to be given Sarah Palin as their Joan of Arc. Armored by Neiman and Sacs, she led the faithful into battle as her senior commander never could. That his adjutants have, after their defeat, sought to burn her as a witch (pace Bishop Muthee) testifies to the power she summoned within the party. As the Middle Ages wore on, peasants' revolts became more and more frequent.

Peter Steinfels takes the gloves off this morning in his portrait of the Catholic bishops and the election. What he points to is a deep divide between the increasingly large numbers of bishops (more than 60) who more or less told their flocks to cast their vote based on the candidate's position on abortion and the official bishops' position--as outlined in the USCCB's 2007 statement on faithful citizenship. Peter managed to get hold of Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn, who had charge of the drafting of that document, and who warned against what in fact many bishops all but did: endorsing particular candidates:

“It goes against our tradition to do that,” he said. “It hasn’t done any good for the candidate, or for the church or for conscience.”

Bishop DiMarzio lamented the fact that “people want black and white answers” rather than the whole legacy of moral analysis and reflection that “the Catholic Church can offer.” At the same time, it was clear that the possibility that a well-informed, sincere Catholic might use that legacy to vote for Senator Obama strained his imagination.

Update: By way of perspective, here's John Allen's month-old report on Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria, explain why he would "obviously" vote for Barack Obama, despite his pro-choice views on abortion:

“Of course I believe that abortion is wrong, that it’s killing innocent life,” he said. “I also believe, however, that those who are against abortion should be consistent.

“If my choice is between a person who makes room for abortion, but who is really pro-life in terms of justice in the world, peace in the world, I will prefer him to somebody who doesn’t support abortion but who is driving millions of people in the world to death,” Onaiyekan said.

“It’s a whole package, and you never get a politician who will please you in everything,” he said. “You always have to pick and choose.”

Amazingly enough, Tom ("Common Good Catholic") Perriello seems to have knocked off Virgil (Good ol' Boy) Goode in Virginia's fifth CD. Goode, you'll recall, is the guy who sent around a letter to his constituents two years ago tying the election of Keith Ellison, the country's first Muslim member of Congress (who used a Koran for his swearing in ceremony), to the immigration issue:

I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America. If American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

"He's off to greener pastures," Ellison said in a phone interview Friday. "It breaks my heart."

Update: On Slate, Dahlia Lithwick, of Charlottesville, gushes.

Jeremiah Wright is back, and plastered all over the front page of today's Hartford Courant. He appeared at Kingdom Life Christian Church in Milford under the auspices of Hartford's Theological Education Institute, a rather rather conservative Protestant outfit, to give an address on "The Bible, Race and American History." So far as can be told from reporter Rinker Buck's story, Wright's central point was that, as he put it, "How a country sees God determines how they see humans," and that therefore, racism and sexism are inevitable in a country that sees God as white and male. It's a proposition worth debating, including on empirical grounds. To what extent do Americans see God as white and male?

Naturally, it was the image of Wright the Inflamer that drew the media attention. Local Fox News was on the scene (its report embedded in the on-line version of the Courant story), and--perhaps to its dismay--found the pastor "devoid of demonization." He only addressed the election of his former congregant in the q and a, and Fox showed a bite suggesting that he considered it not a bad thing: "We've come a long way but still have a long way to go." Buck chose to quote a more typically Wrightian remark:

"My biggest fear is that we will take what's just happened in this country and think a whole lot has changed," Wright said.

"If you take a Tiger Woods, a Michael Jordan or a Barack Obama, their success should not lull us into thinking society has changed."

Once upon a time, Catholics were a solid Democratic constituency, but nowadays it makes the most sense to see them simply as that religious agglomeration which most closely approximates the American voting public at large. On Tuesday, they went for Obama 54-45, very close to the 52-47 margin in the electorate as a whole. Four years ago, they went for Bush, again at almost the same rate as the entire electorate. If we separate out the white Catholics, we find a constituency somewhat more likely to vote Democratic than whites as a whole, but still leaning mildly toward the GOP. Obama cut the Republican margin among them by more than half, from 13 points in 2004 to five points (47-52). That's a couple of points better than Gore did in 2000. White Catholics are more Democratic than whites as a whole, who went for McCain by 12 points, 55-43.

To really understand Catholic voting patterns, however, it's useful to look some state-by-state comparisons. We've put together available exit poll data on Catholic voting from 2004 as well as 2008, and here are some highlights, region by region. (N.B. Not all state exit polls have results for Catholics.)

From a friend's daughter:

so last night i was at a comedy show and sarah silverman made a guest appearance. and i thought to myself "now's my chance to be that totally weird girl that talks to a celebrity about my weird family." i didn't even hesitate...

me: oh, hi sarah. i'm sara too.
sarah: oh. (she looks up at me from her iphone solitaire game, somewhat dumbfounded)
me: so, i've been meaning to tell you (uhm, what?! who says that to someone they've never met?!), a week before the great schlepp video came out, my dad told me he wouldn't vote for obama and i told him that if he voted for obama, i'd marry a jew.
sarah: oh great! that's great! (did she mean it or was she just trying to get this awkward girl to leave her alone? YOU DECIDE 2008)
me: yeah, well, kind of, but i've never been into jews.
sarah: oh, you will find one.
me: no, they all like phish.
sarah: what? (now i've really lost her)
me: all jewish guys like phish the band.
sarah: no no, not ALL of them. you'll find one.
me: ok, well, i just wanted to tell you the story, anyway, you going on tonight?
sarah: yeah, but i have NO material. nothing.
me: ok, yeah, i bet you won't be funny at all.
sarah: seriously, i have nothing.
me: ok, i'll warn all my friends that you're gonna suck. it was nice meeting you.
sarah: you too!

As readers of this blog know, I've been pushing the hypothesis that evangelicals in the Midwest were going to be shifting to Obama in ways that their co-religionists in other parts of the country, especially the South, were not. And lo and behold, yesterday's vote (see this great interactive map) more or less bears that out. Across the Midwest, where evangelicals tended to vote 3-1 for George W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004, they tended to vote only 2-1 for John McCain over Barack Obama yesterday. Meanwhile, in the South and what we call the Southern Crossroads, whereas in 2004 evangelicals voted 3-1 or better for Bush over Kerry, in most states they actually voted by greater margins for McCain over Obama.

Let's compare Indiana and Oklahoma. Hoosier evangelicals favored Bush by 77-22 but McCain by only 66-41. Oklahomans, by contrast, voted 77-23 for Bush and 77-22 for McCain. Midwest pickups for Obama included 11 points in Ohio, 13 in Michigan, 11 in Iowa, 11 in South Dakota, and 19 in Nebraska. But he lost one point in Alabama, five in Mississippi, three in Kentucky, five in Tennessee, eight in Louisiana, and five in Arkansas. There were some exceptions. In Missouri, which we include in the Southern Crossroads (but which has real Midwestern features), there was a 14-point shift to Obama. And in Kansas, which we include in the Midwest (but which has real Southern Crossroads features), there was a 2-point shift to McCain. Meanwhile, out West, there were significant shifts by evangelicals toward Obama in Oregon (15), Colorado (20), and Idaho (12). In the latter two states, however, the shift didn't even manage to bring the vote down to 3-1 levels.)

I haven't tried to do all the calculations, but one thing is clear. In Indiana's astonishing flip to blue, fully half the 21-point shift came from the evangelicals. The larger question has to do with explaining the overall bifurcation. The most likely explanation for what happened in the South and Southern Crossroads is the persistence of racial prejudice in those regions. It's also the case that this is where evangelicals are most heavily organized and mobilized as Republican partisans. But in the Midwest, there is Obama's identity as a Midwesterner, and the common Midwestern religious sensibility that he appealed to, to take into account. Not to belabor the point, but Obama's communitarian outlook is very much the Midwestern way--a point Andrew Walsh and I make in our new book, One Nation, Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. The book postulates that, led by the likes of Obama, we may be now be trading the Crossroads ethos of Bush and Company for a Midwestern one. As the book's last line reads: "If there is to be a new style of religious pluralism in America, there is something to be said for having it emerge from the Midwest."

Update: Does Ralph Reed not know that Obama-voting evangelicals made a crucial difference in Indiana or is he blowing smoke?

From Kevin Sack's fine report from Albany, GA:

Many, like the Rev. Horace C. Boyd, who was then and is now pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, viewed the moment through the prism of biblical prophecy. If Dr. King was the movement’s Moses, doomed to die without crossing the Jordan, it would fall to Mr. Obama to be its Joshua, they said.

It will be widely noted that the God Gap, as measured by the partisan preference of frequent (weekly or more often) worship attenders, shrank from 20 points in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections to 12 points this time around. And some may be inclined to credit this year's focus on religious outreach by Obama and the DNC for what happened. But in fact, the shift occurred in the 2006 midterm elections. Then, what had been a 20-point preference by frequent attenders for GOP congressional candidates in 2000 and 2004 shrank to 13 points. Meanwhile, the gap among less frequent attenders bumped up from 13 points for Democratic candidates in 2004 to 25 points in 2006--the same territory as the 23 percent of less frequent attenders who went for Obama. Measured in terms of comparing frequent and less frequent attenders, then, the God Gap remains as big as ever, just with both the former and the latter both more Democratically inclined than they were in 2000-2004.

Keeping in mind the several caveats noted yesterday, the overall conclusion to draw from yesterday's voting by religion is that the more things change, the more they stay pretty much the same.

Let's start with the first of the Abrahamic faiths--the Jews. In 2004, they bumped a bit toward George W. Bush, up from 79-19 for Gore in 2000 to 76-24 for Kerry. This time around, despite expectations that they would provide John McCain with the biggest Jewish vote for a Republican since Ronald Reagan, they reverted to type, voting for Barack Obama 78-21. Credit Sarah, Palin not Silverman, and the economy for that. I figured the margin would be smaller, 70-29. But for all the vile emails, the huffing and puffing of the neocons, the efforts at guilt by association, the Liebermanic campaigning, it was business as usual. Jewish Republicans seemed destined to be the Cubs fans of American religion--always hopeful, always disappointed.

Update: I'm trying to figure out how all Jews could break 78-21 for Obama, but white Jews break 83-17 for him. What kind of non-white Jews would be less likely to give Obama their votes? Any ideas?

Here are a few last findings from Harris and Pew, the former having to do with registered voters and the latter with likely ones. The polls are pretty close overall, Obama 53-44 (Harris) and 52-46 (Pew). White Catholics diverge radically: McCain 57-40 (Harris), Obama 47-45 (Pew). Harris has white evangelicals surprisingly close (for them): McCain 61-34; Pew has them at a more expected 68-23. Harris has Jews backing Obama 76-24 (nothing from Pew).

If there's anything really noteworthy here as we wrap up our pre-election poll-reading, it's what Harris reports on Mormons, who tend to come in for precious little attention, given their staunch Republicanism and demographic concentration in states (Idaho, Utah) where it would take a partisan sea change to make a difference in a presidential election. Anyway, Harris finds Mormons backing McCain 60-37. That seems like a pretty healthy plurality until you realize that 81 percent of Mormons voted for George W. Bush.

What's up with that? Well, at a session on Mitt Romney's presidential campaign at the American Academy of Religion, it emerged from Mormon attendees that there was a good deal of unhappiness among Mormons with the Republican Party and how Romney was treated by its evangelical base. The anecdotal evidence cited suggests that not a few Mormons have decided not to vote for the GOP nominee, and may even pull the Democratic lever.
Could such a decision make a difference? Well, both Nevada and Arizona are pretty close, and Mormons constitute six and five percent of their populations respectively. A shift of 40 points among Mormons would equal 2-3 percent of the vote in those states--which could well turn out to be the difference.

Pre-election polls come and go, and obsessed as we are with them, they matter little when all is said and done. But exit polls are something else entirely, both for historians and political scientists assessing the significance of elections and for politicians and their minions planning for the future. Think, in recent years, of the amount of attention given the God Gap or the 2004 "Moral Values" vote. So as the polls close tonight, the exit polls will be on display for instant analysis; I expect to be doing a bit of it myself. I am, however, more aware than ever of the caveats. Here are three.

1. Exit polls in the absence of actual vote totals reflect guesswork on what particular precincts are worth in terms of the total vote. When the totals are in, the exit polls are then adjusted to reflect the actual vote. In an election like the present one, where there are major imponderables (the turnout among younger voters and African Americans foremost among them), the guesswork is more than usually difficult. So initial indications of the voting patterns of various groups, including religious ones, will need to be taken with a major grain of salt.

2. Exit poll calculations this year are further complicated by the large number of voters--perhaps one-third of the total--who have cast their votes early. The pollsters are doing surveying of these voters, but integrating a survey of voters who say they've voted into an exit poll is not an easy thing.

3. Our new American Religious Identification Survey raises problems with assessing the evangelical vote. It turns out that nearly 40 percent of Mainline Protestants (identified by denomination) and 15 percent of Catholics answer yes to the standard exit poll/survey approach to identifying evangelicals: "Do you consider yourself an evangelical or born-again Christian?" Nationwide, that's maybe one-third of the voters who answer yes, but we don't know yet how these "evangelicals" are distributed regionally or state-by-state. There are many things to weigh here but one is: In places the Midwest, where there's a large proportion of mainliners, it may be that indications of a greater tendency of "evangelicals" to prefer Obama just reflect a mainline propensity.

Bottom line: Any immediate conclusions drawn from the exit polls have to be considered highly provisional. It's going to take a while to get this sorted out.

For the past couple of days, I've been in Chicago attending the annual meeting of that big, baggy association of scholars known as the American Academy of Religion. From a balcony outside the lavish Conrad Room (as in Paris's forebear) high atop the Chicago Hilton on Michigan Ave. you can look down at the white tents in Grant Park, where Barack Obama will speak words of either joy or consolation to a hometown crowd tomorrow night. Beyond, Lake Michigan stretches out to Canada, whither many AAR members contemplate moving should consolation be in order.

Not really, but while Obama may still be struggling to line up the country's frequent worshipers, he has carried the day with those who study them and what and whom they worship. And like liberals everywhere, the scholars have been glued to their TV sets and computer screens, worriedly reading the entrails of the polls for any sign their champion is flagging--in Pennsylvania, in Colorado, wherever. Not that there aren't critics, but they tend to be from the left rather than the right. About Obama's stated intention to pursue the war in Afghanistan more vigorously, his less than thoroughgoing health care plan, grumbling can be heard. There's regret that he has found it necessary to keep the the hem of his garment well away from the American Muslim community, though the reasons for this are acknowledged.

At a session dealing with her recent book, The Party Faithful: How and Why the Democrats are Closing the God Gap, Amy Sullivan allowed as how her subtitle might have been a tad premature. One of the reasons, she suggested, was that the Obama campaign had not taken advantage of opportunities to pursue evangelicals, young ones in particular, including on the campuses of colleges like Wheaton and at Christian music festivals over the summer. The religious focus of the Obama campaign, as in previous Democratic ones, has tended to be on African American churchgoers--who, she quipped, hardly needed much energizing this year.

I presided yesterday at a lively and well attended session on religion and the campaign that included a wealth of smart comments by a clutch of bright young scholars: Erik Owens of B.C., Corey Walker of Brown, Melissa Proctor of Holy Cross, Eric Gregory of Princeton, and Jerome Copulsky of Goucher. At the end, a questioner asked what would happen if Obama were elected and within a short time it became clear that nothing much had changed.

Yes, prophecy fails. But for the moment at least, it seemed like the risk was more than worth taking.

From the latest WaPo-ABC tracking poll:

Younger white evangelical Protestants (under age 39) break more for McCain than do older people in that group, 85 percent to 13 percent.

As for the Jews, the poll has them at 70-29 for Obama, which (if I do say so myself) is what I predicted two months ago:

Revised prediction on the Jewish vote in November: Obama, 70 percent; McCain, 28 percent, Nader 2 percent.