Good News For the Democratic Party: The Collapse Of Evangelical-Right Wing Is On The Way -- They Want Change Too

The beneficiary of this move to sanity is going to be Senator Obama. For reasons I have discussed elsewhere here and here, Obama transcends easy categories and definition. His prophetic and inspirational edge also makes evangelical types comfortable with him in a way they aren't with Senator Clinton or McCain.

I was at a concert in Boston recently and the head of the English department at one of the big evangelical colleges in the Boston area came up to me and asked me who I was voting for. When I told him it was Obama he leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. The fact that Obama is a Democrat, a progressive and a black man would have made this response the truly impossible 20 years ago. These days I wasn't surprised.

It would also not surprise me if the group that puts Obama over-the-top when he goes up against McCain (yes, it is going to be Obama) will be disaffected former Republican Evangelicals desperate to affirm something positive after spending so much of their lives wallowing in hate and negativity. They won't vote for Clinton because she is too much like the negative world they are trying to escape. They want hope and real change.

The media have -- of course -- missed this story just as they missed the rise of the religious right in the 1970s something I describe in detail in Crazy For God. People "like that" just don't show up on the media radar screen as "important." And the media are lazy and only talking to the has-been leaders.

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