This morning we wake up into a new and strange world, a world that has no Sam Brownback presidential campaign in it. Given how long the presidential campaign season has already been going on, with only a few months left to go before the first primary, it is a big enough change in the world that many will find it unsettling. The dog may start barking excitedly at phantoms, the cat will get antsy. Adults who will be tempted to take to the bottle should think instead of how best they can help their children deal with their confusion. As the family gathers around the TV in gleeful anticipation of the next debate by the Republican candidates, the children's merry laughter may turn into something akin to a death rattle, as they scan the screen and their blood turns to ice. "But...but where," they will ask, "is the shifty-eyed man who looked as if he were waiting for the debate to end and for everyone else to clear out of the room so he could spray for bugs?" You will need to take them onto your lap and gently explain that while everyone wishes that presidential campaigns could go on forever and forever, sometimes God looks down and sees a campaign that for some reason displeases him, and He chooses to see to it that the campaign doesn't get to go on for as long as we might like, because no one will give it any money. We call this "Intelligent Design."

Brownback's fast fade is a reminder that the real key question of the 2008 campaign may well be, "What does the religious right want?" Well, what they want is another George Bush, Jr.--a true believer who they can easily tell is one of their own but who is accepted by the media and a mass of voters as both normal and likable, since that equals electability. But what will they settle for? Brownback was widely taken by the mainstream media as a poster boy for the religious right and conservative values voters, which is understandable but also shows just how little they understand just how picky these people can be. Yes, Brownback opposes abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother. Yes, he's reliably crazy on such issues as gay marriage and gun control. He believes in a flat tax and would like to use the District of Columbia as a "test case" to see whether it works out great or just brilliantly. He does not believe that the U.S. Constitution supports privacy rights of any kind. He used one of his debate appearances to confirm that he doesn't believe in the theory of evolution, and then launched himself into a fine, defensive tizzy about it after he noticed people on TV snickering about it. But he also spends a lot of time on, and seems to actually care about, such issues as combating genocide and bringing "price transparency" to the medical industry, things that the true believers must see as frivolous distractions from the real work of making sure that same-sex couples can't leave the house without fear of a stoning.

And, most importantly, he supports offering illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. That, more than anything, is probably the real deal-breaker, just as it's done more to alienate the president's base than the war in Iraq or his letting his dog go on the Bill of Rights. Deranged political obsessions are cyclical, even ones that people insist they hold because God told them to. Nobody in the Moral Majority got upset when Ronald Reagan wanted to offer illegals a path to citizenship, and certainly none of today's inhabitants of Gantry Gulch took it as a sour omen in 2000 that Bush and his sidekick Rove sometimes went weeks without shutting up about how badly they wanted to open up the Republican party to Latin voters. But then after 9/11, these two geniuses decided that they could have their permanent Republican majority by encouraging everyone in the country to stay shit-scared and xenophobic, never thinking that they might have trouble getting their base to always check with them first about who they were supposed to hate. The current obsession among right-wing yahoos with illegal immigrants promises to also be an crippling speed bump for Mike Huckabee, who in most areas of the religious-right litmus test makes Brownback look like Oscar Wilde, but who has a history of advising white hammerheads to chill out on the subject, even going so far as to call attempts to cut off state benefits to illegal immigrants "un-Christian." (If you want to see a faith-based conservative go absolutely batshit, select some especially mean-spirited or bigoted opinion of his and tell him it's "un-Christian." You'll think you're in the climactic scene of Ol' Yeller.) However, not even the religious right can live on anti-immigrant racism alone, which is why hardly anybody's lying awake nights shivering in terror over the prospect of ever hearing the phrase "President Tancredo." Duncan Hunter--if this isn't your big chance, son, you ain't gonna get one.

cross-posted at The Phil Nugent Experience]