George Packer gets close to the truth, but then veers rather badly off course:

He gambled, all right, but it was in the direction of orthodoxy—for Palin is a creature and an icon of the Republicans’ evangelical base, which came into full possession of the Party this week and completed the G.O.P.’s conversion to identity politics.

What Packer misses after coming so close is that religious, and specifically evangelical, identity politics did not triumph in the GOP this year.  The pseudo-conservative Mormon and the secular neoconservative received close to two-thirds of the GOP delegates in this year’s contest, movement elites actively opposed “the evangelical candidate” and most evangelical leaders, as I noted before, made a point of not basing their endorsements (if they made any at all) on shared religious views.  Indeed, one could say, and it has been said before, that Huckabee’s ghettoization as “the evangelical candidate” showed the very clear limits of a campaign that was portrayed as being entirely driven by religious identity.  It is important to remember that while Huckabee’s most reliable cohort of voters were evangelicals, he generally campaigned as the generic working-class social conservative (which is why sometimes people mistook him for a new Buchanan and consequently misrepresented him as hostile to free trade agreements) and proceeded to lose badly in every state where evangelicals did not make up a large part of the primary electorate.  Part of this failure was caused by resistance to a Southern candidate outside places that were culturally Southern or caucuses that had large evangelical blocs, part was caused by precisely the sort of class-based derision aimed at Huckabee’s background that is now deployed against Palin’s (the difference being that it was conservative elites doing the deriding during the winter months), part was based in exaggerated claims about Huckabee’s deviations from economic conservatism (which were no worse than the movement champion of Romney) and part was based in legitimate critiques of Huckabee’s immigration record and “compassionate” conservative rhetoric.  A crucial part in resisting Huckabee was the party’s desire to keep evangelicals from having one of their own in charge of the entire party; putting one of them on as the VP is more acceptable, since it reinforces the message that evangelicals should always take second place to the “national security” conservatives–the ”national greatness” and neoconservative elements of the coalition–and makes sure that their priorities are always subordinated to the foreign policy agenda of those elements.  As with Bush, some neoconservatives have expressed concern with her lack of foreign policy experience, but the example of Bush’s flight away from the foreign policy realism of his father’s advisors has to be reassuring to them and Palin’s own natural “pro-Israel” inclinations will give them no cause for concern. 

Huckabee was personally too much like Bush for many people, but in terms of policy the most Bushian of the primary field was clearly McCain, and it was ultimately Bushism–not Romney’s three-legs-of-the-stool-ism or Fred Thompson’s “back to Reagan” revival–that prevailed in the primaries and again in the VP selection.  I mean, how has no one made this point already?  McCain provides the basic policy trajectory of a third Bush term, and Palin provides the biography of a folksy pro-life ”reformer with results” governor of a large, oil-rich reliably Republican state in the West–it is pretty close to the Bush/Cheney ticket in reverse, isn’t it? 

The Palin choice was essentially a bow to current movement orthodoxy, but what does that mean after eight years of Bush?  What Ross said last year remains true today:

Since the Republicans’ stinging defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, Bush’s distinctive ideological cocktail—social conservatism and an accommodation with big government at home, and a moralistic interventionism abroad—has similarly been derided by many as political poison. The various ingredients of “Bushism,” it’s been argued, have alienated fiscal hawks and foreign-policy realists, Catholics and libertarians—in short, everyone but the party’s evangelical base.

But someone must have forgotten to tell the GOP presidential field. If you consider how the nation’s most ambitious Republicans are positioning themselves for 2008, Bushism looks like it could have surprising staying power.

Aside from warring against the dreaded earmarks, the McCain/Palin ticket does not propose a radical break with any of the elements of Bushism that Ross describes.  McCain has succumbed to the demands of the movement and the party, but the movement and party have themselves imbibed so much of Bushism that McCain did not have to give up much of anything, except his personal preference for a ticket with Lieberman that would have been entirely obsessed with militarism and war.  In the warped universe of Bush Republicanism, McCain/Palin was the relatively moderate alternative to the extreme Lieberman option.  In truth, by choosing Palin McCain made more of a statement of continuity with the last eight years than if he had chosen any of the other people frequently named as possibilities.  Naturally, given the Bushist habit of abusing language, this is being presented as a clean break and a fresh start.  Rhetorically, McCain and Palin have aligned themselves as the enemies of the status quo, while Obama and Biden are setting themselves up as the steady preservers of establishment interests.  In reality, however, McCain and Palin are reformers every bit as much as the invasion of Iraq was a war of self-defense.

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