Reading tea party leaves on marriage

Frank Cannon, president of American Principles in Action, writing at Politico: “It’s already clear where the glamour resides. The cachet is to be found with those elite Republican fund-raisers and political maestros, who favor not just a tamping down of social issue activism but an embrace of avant-garde ideas like same-sex marriage . . . Being a ‘conservative for same-sex marriage’ is now the maximum meme. Which makes the political failure it obscures all the more emblematic. Political evidence past and present renders the advice of men like Mehlman and Schmidt not only suspect but downright foolhardy . . . The most recent evidence reveals that nothing has changed for the populist appeal of traditional marriage.”