The GOP—Grand Old Pulpit

Iowa Democrats launched their party's nomination process with the most ambiguous directive since Casey Stengel ordered his ballplayers to "line up alphabetically by height." Iowa Republicans made a choice that is certain to worsen the perception that the GOP is a regional church miscast as a national political organization.

Iowa Democrats gave considerable support to angry John Edwards who, although he is the fiery tribune of the proletariat, came in third among union voters. But Iowans gave even more support to Barack Obama, whose political persona is anodyne.

His success splendidly refutes the Democratic Party's longstanding embrace of the theory of identity politics and its corollary, the theory of categorical representation. Those theories are that individuals are defined, politically, by their race, gender or ethnicity; hence people can be properly represented only by people from the same category. Those theories look even more preposterous and dated after Obama's success in a state with a negligible minority population. Among the losers in Iowa were Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and all the others who still subscribe to a racial narrative of strife and oppression that has remained remarkably unchanged through 50 years of stunning progress, of which Obama's candidacy is powerful evidence.

Entrance polls indicated that 60 percent of Republicans participating in Iowa's caucuses were evangelical Christians, and Mike Huckabee got 46 percent of their votes. But he won just one in seven of the nonevangelical participants. Those numbers intimate a Republican vulnerability that Huckabee exacerbates.

In 2006, evangelicals gave Republicans more votes than Democrats received from African-Americans and union members combined. In a Huckabeean party, a growing dependence on the devout would increasingly define the GOP as a cultural enclave in which many Americans, including many devout Americans, would not be comfortable. Such a party would be largely confined to a regional enclave.

Since at least 1980, Democrats have had a severe problem with the South. Today much of that region remains safely Republican. But Republicans have a more serious problem with the North than Democrats now have with the South.