Christian Right Too Insiderish?

God-o-Meter doesn't totally buy Ross Douthat's New York Times op-ed arguing that John McCain's success among Christian conservatives at the polls shows that the Christian Right's leadership is out of touch with the movement's rank-and-file. After all, Mike Huckabee has been mopping the floor with McCain among evangelicals in recent primaries.

But God-o-Meter does agree with Douthat that McCain's modest success among evangelicals--he split their votes with Huckabee and Mitt Romney in a handful of states--and the possibility of his faring better among evangelicals in the general election, when he won't have to compete with Mike Huckabee, suggests that the nitpicking orthodoxy demanded by Christian Right leaders is not reflective of in-the-pews evangelicals:

[R]eligious conservatives who listened to James Dobson were asked to believe that Mr. McCain’s consistent pro-life voting record was less important than the impact his campaign-finance bill had on the National Right to Life Committee’s ability to purchase issue ads on television 60 days before an election. Or that his consistent support for conservative judicial nominees, and his pledge to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of John Roberts and Sam Alito, mattered less than his involvement in the “Gang of 14” compromise on judicial filibusters.