fracturing alliances

Good article by Jonathan Raban on the US elections today in the Guardian:

"What's fascinating about this primary season in the US is how on both sides, Republican and Democrat, the campaigns are exposing all the underlying fault-lines in American society: in nearly 20 years of living in this country, I've never seen these fissures so clearly mapped before. First, Karl Rove's grand alliance of fundamentalist Christians, corporate CEOs, libertarians, neoconservatives and traditional small-government-big-defence types, which was designed to establish the Republicans as the reigning party of the 21st century, showed signs of breaking up into its original component parts in the mid-term elections of 2006. Now the fundamentalists have their own candidate (Mike Huckabee); the corporations theirs (Mitt Romney); the libertarians have Ron Paul; just hours ago, the neocons still had Rudy Giuliani, one of whose senior advisers was the altogether terrifying figure of Norman "World War Four" Podhoretz; and John McCain's old-soldier pitch is aimed at those surviving conservatives - a likely majority, it seems at present - for whom none of the above categories will serve."

All of which makes this a really fascinating election. Read the rest of the article, it's good.