Bloomberg has a good article on the intra-party conflict between Wall Street and the Evangelicals, epitomized in this election cycle by Mike Huckabee.
The roots of this tension go back to the 1970s when the GOP decided to woo Democrats alienated by the ascendancy of the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party.
At the time, it meant paying lip-service to the God-and-apple-pie folks in the South and Midwest. Work hard, go to church, be nice to your neighbors... Who can argue with values like those?
Well, things have changed. And the Evangelicals want what they think is rightfully theirs -- power.
"From Reagan on, the rhetoric from Republican presidents was always more responsive to the evangelical community than the actions that they took,'' said Thomas Mann, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It's one of the reasons why some religious conservatives have become disaffected by the political process.''
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