While the general public will (I'm certain) soon almost entirely forget the entire issue, and will certainly not remember it as negatively as it is polling at the moment ("Wasn't that the thing were the Republicans tried to stop the Democrats from letting that woman die?," I can hear some "undecided" voter saying once the whole issue has been push-polled and pundited to death once again, just in time for the 2006 mid-terms.), the religious right will not forget, and will once again be content to play its assigned role as the shock troops of the GOP GOTV effort.

Today, Billmon agrees with that assessment:

The propaganda machine has plenty of time to repair the damage. Heck, within a few months Fox News will have the true believers convinced that Harry Reid personally pulled out Shiavo's feeding tube while Nancy Pelosi held her down. The ordinary rubes, meanwhile, almost certainly will have forgotten the whole sorry affair. If not, the machine can always manufacture some fresh outrage to wave in their faces (Up next on the No Spin Zone: The liberal attack on the Fourth of July!)

But while this media storm too shall pass, the [religious right] will still be out there, getting angrier by the minute and counting the days until the next election.

We really should have learned from the last couple of elections that:

• Facts don't necessarily beat lies, if the lies are presented in a way that feeds into and reinforces outstanding prejudices and preconceptions;



• Having strong positive qualities in a specific area is not necessarily a good defense against being attacked in that area if your opponent is willing to lie repeatedly and without any concession at all to the validity of facts;



• It may be that one's strongest points are, in actuality, one's weakest spots, if it leads one to expect not to be attacked in that area;

More agile minds than mine will have to figure out what bizarre jujitsu movements are necessary to conduct a political campaign with these thoughts in mind, but, at the very least, it should lead us to understand that the current tension between the Republican party (the governmental wing of the new radical conservative establishment) and its shock troops, the religious right, is not automatically a winning situation for us unless we can manipulate it in some way to our benefit. Without that manipulation, it's unlikely that there's going to be any long-term gain for us: where, exactly, are the fundamentalists going to go? Do we really expect conscience and concern about radicalism to motivate the leaders of the GOP to sever or downgrade their connections with the religous right? Such a move would be tantamount to suicide.

Instead of the coalition cracking up over this, I'd expect to see in the near future the GOP doing more things that the religious right would approve of -- and not meaningless bones thrown to appease them, or even small portions of red meat to keep them at bay. I'd expect some real, substantive placating to go on, and soon -- anything to keep the shock troops in line. The trick on the GOP's part is to make those moves without alienating the rest of the electorate sufficiently to lose their support.

It's dicey, but, as Sam Spade knows, it can be done.

Addenda: Matt Yglesias:

Any political coalition achieving anything resembling majority status in America is going to involve a lot of disagreements. There's nothing unusual about it, or any particular reason to think such coalitions can't be sustained.

I should probably also make explicit what might be inferred from what I wrote above: the "cracks" in the Republican coalition won't lead to its break-up unless we use them to our advantage, but we're in a particularly poor position to do that. Certainly, there's nothing in the Democratic/liberal/progressive coalition to attract the religious right, and that we'd have to attract to us moderate members of the Republican establishment -- which is why I've been harping on Snowe, Chafee, Collins and company. But those folks, although apparently put off by the behavior of the religious right over Schiavo, seem not to be interested in following their consciences and jumping ship.

The open question, of course, is how much the Dems have done to help those moderates make that decision, and incite their disaffection. My feeling: not very much, if at all. Whether that's because no one's thought of it, or because we're still fighting under "gentlemen's rules," I don't know.