Rick Perlstein (Full disclosure: Rick is a friend and a former boss ) has a great piece in The Nation detailing John McCain's complicated relationship with conservatives. First they declared him anathema because he didn't have a long enough record of kissing up to them and then, when it became clear that he was the nominee, they made an extremely awkward about-face and embraced him as one of their own.
As Rick says, the fact that McCain won shows that conservative powerbrokers like Rush Limbaugh, Newsmax, and The National Review have much less power than is generally supposed. This is not because there aren't a great many conservatives out there, but because conservative voters are more concerned about issues than whether candidates make ablutions before the alter of the holy trinity of Reagan, Buckley, and Norquist. Conservative leaders just don't have the cult-leader-like power generally ascribed to them. Basically, they've started believing their own press.
A similar thing happened with Huckabee. Leaders of the religious right largely ignored him but he still had the support of most evangelical Republicans. Unlike McCain, who does occasionally depart from conservative dogma, Huckabee is a pure representation of his faction, but in both cases leaders showed themselves out of touch with their bases and voters showed themselves more interested in substantive positions than the fatwas issued by their respective leaders.
Pundits, like generals, are always fighting the last war and that's what we're seeing here. This election is no different. In Rick's books Before the Storm and Nixonland (which comes out in May and I can assure you, having had the pleasure of reading the galleys, is fantastic) one of the consistent themes is the way the media repeatedly vastly underestimated the strength of the conservative movement. Similarly, they overestimate the power of the leaders of the conservative movement and religious right today.
--Sam Boyd
