During the 2004 election, Karl Rove, the president's chief strategist, manufactured a brazen strategy to re-elect George Bush: use cultural issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion to drive conservative evangelicals to the polls and bet on the continued political apathy of most Americans to win. His gamble won, but according to the New York Time's David Kirkpatrick it won't likely happen again and leading Christian conservatives know it:
Conservative Christian leaders in Washington acknowledge a "leftward drift" among evangelicals, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and the movement's chief advocate in Washington.... Perkins compared the phenomenon to the century-old division in American Protestantism between the liberal mainline and the orthodox evangelical churches. "It is almost like another split coming within the evangelicals," he said.
Does this mean the Democratic nominee for president is a shoo-in for the Oval Office? That's debatable. Despite calls from the Dobsons of the evangelical right to endorse a third-party candidate if Rudy Giuliani receives the Republican nomination, Rudy is the front runner among conservative Christians despite his philandering, abortion-approving ways. If a plurality of conservative Christians back him and he draws enough law-and-order and national security independents and moderates to the ballot box, a Giuliani presidency is feasible, despite the realization among leftward drifting evangelicals that Jesus' greatest gift to humanity wasn't just (an impossible) resurrection but his social gospel.
