Democrats not religious enough? - UPDATE

I usually despise David Brooks's NYT columns. He's neither smart, nor funny, and often he's wildly off the mark. But his recent column has me worried, because it seems fairly convincing, and entirely frightening. In a nutshell, he claims that Kerry - or any other democrat who does not "exude religiosity" from every pore of his being - will never have a chance of winning the presidency in a country where the vast majority of people are terribly invested in organized religion. Bill Clinton paraded his baptist faith and won the evalgelical vote in 1992 and 1996. A Matter of Faith

UPDATE - what a loser! In his latest column, Brooks admits that he got the numbers wrong: Clinton won handsomely in 1992 and 1996 WITHOUT winning the evalgelical vote, which blows away his entire argument, and causes me great relief. And to think that most reviews thought that Brooks' writing was sloppy BEFORE this...

BTW - I think the newest summer sport has to be watching conservative commentators go apoplectic over Moore's F9/11. The funnest thing is that Brooks (like the rest) has no idea what to say, seeing that it uses precisely the same kind of pseudo-intellectual shock-tactics they thought they had all to themselves. Listening to the author of "On Paradise Drive" and "Bobos in Paradise" accuse OTHERS of not producing sufficiently complex, thoughtful, and reasoned analysis is indeed laughable. I think these commentators are not as worried about Moore's progressive ideas as they are LOSING MARKETSHARE now that there's a progressive voice entering the mass media.