Victory with strings

The Republicans & Bush are now acting like it's "all them". And it is all them in a sense - both houses and the presidency under their control. But there are still big limits, and Bush's victory has consequences.

First off, Bush & Rove relied heavily on Religious conservatives acting on "values" - with 11 anti-gay ballot initiatives, they prodded their faithful en masse to the polls (something again, that we missed out on with the 18-34 crowd). But this victory may very well be a poison pill and an achilles' heel: the GOP is not made up of only the Religious value-based conservatives. There are economic conservatives (Schwartzenegger, Gulianni, etc) and Libertarians who go with lesser-of-two-evils but cannot stand the religious nuts. Added to this, under the umbrella of "religious conservatives" you have a RAINBOW of different value-systems, some of them diametrically opposed to one another: Protestants vs. Catholics, Baptists vs. Mormons, Pentacostal vs. Traditionalist, HELL - even Baptist vs. Baptist (southern v. ecumenical), and Methodist vs. Methodist (United v. Free v. Wesleyan). Appealling to one, will cause squabbling between them all. This happened before (see: the English civil war and the general European religious civil wars), and it can happen again! Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

These religious conservatives are going to see Bush's victory as a mandate, but if Bush runs with their agenda, he's gonna hit a brick wall, because the other GOP factions will split. A victory, but a poisoned victory.