Planetary distances of policy and world-view divide these men, and the Republican debates have the air of cocktail parties whose guests have been selected by random telephone dialling. The candidates deliver monologues: Romney talks chalk, Huckabee cheese, Giuliani cabbages, McCain kings. Here and there a familiar term spoken by one contender - "Iraq", "abortion", "tax code", "illegals" - will trigger a sudden animated reflex from another, but the prevailing mood is one of bemused civility, as at the cocktail party where the plumber's mate stares gloomily into his glass, waiting for the plant geneticist to stop maundering on about rice genomes so that he can get back to the important topic of stopcocks.
Rove's coalition, even more than Reagan's before it, entailed the yoking together of single-issue constituencies that have little in common and are often philosophically incompatible - free marketeers, right-to-lifers, fence-'em-out border zealots, flat-taxers, terror warriors. As many evangelicals have come to deplore the Bush administration's dismal stewardship of the environment, so business owners employing cheap Hispanic labour fear a crackdown on "undocumented" immigrants, and Goldwater-style libertarians recoil from the theocratic tendencies of the fundamentalist base. When Huckabee calls for a "human life amendment" to bring the constitution into line with "God's law", or McCain takes a measured and humane position on immigration, they enrage one sector of the GOP while burnishing their credentials with another.
-- Jonathan Raban, "Divided They Stand," The Guardian, January 31, 2008.