David Warren starts off with some killer stuff:
In the slightly retouched words of my chief Texas correspondent, who was not being entirely facetious, "There are too many Democrats on the left who would rather have their heads sawed off by a Jihadi than admit they've been wrong about everything." And my own sense is that more than a third of the U.S. electorate would vote Kerry against Bush, even if, during the debates, Mr. Kerry's eyes light up green and his head starts rotating. This, alas, has become the "Democrat base".
But then he closes with this:
The reader would be right to read into this grand seismic events. The U.S. public is splitting along religious lines, not between one confession and another, but more vastly between the religious faithful, and the rest. Messrs. Bush and Kerry have, largely without intending, become surrogates in a battle between alternative Americas, and for each side, in the coming election, almost everything is at stake.
Which may be dangerously congruent with reality. The more I think about it, people with active faith are the optimists and secularists/ athiests tend toward the depressing guilt/ nihilism axis.
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