I don't attribute Prop 8's result to some sort of mythical and widespread conservatism in the public as much as I do to those who supported gay equality running a terrible campaign - and this is something prominent gay pundits are beginning to agree with.
How can you run a campaign for the social inclusion of gay and lesbian Americans without running ads that featured gays and lesbians? Look back at the ads and the marketing - at no point did gay and lesbian Americans get featured in ads that humanized either them or their struggle for inclusion. It's political malpractice that an attractive, whitebread gay couple wasn't put on TV in a 30 second spot talking about how they were scared that Proposition 8 would force them to be divorced, and that there's nothing more American than love (or some other saccharine BS).
But nope. That didn't happen, and we saw the results.
A more interesting nail in the coffin of the center-right nation nonsense was the fact that an abortion ban couldn't even pass in South Dakota - which is unbelievable, frankly.
While I appreciate that your mother has suddenly switched parties because of McCain, I find it highly unlikely that this speaks to some sort of latent and silent conservatism in the larger public. I worked as a newspaper editor for the entirety of the the campaign and the primaries - editing conservatives and liberals alike - and consumed more news, watched more speeches and did more research than anyone who wasn't being paid to do it. So while I respect that your mother discovered conservative tendencies within herself and accept that somehow this was because of John McCain being a Maverick or whatever, I'm not sure she was watching the same campaign I or anyone else who was covering the thing - liberal or conservative - was watching.
To paraphrase conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, all McCain offered was 1970s "identity politics bullshit." McCain ran on two policies: continued military commitment in Iraq and abolishing health insurance regulations that prevent interstate sales of insurance (something numerous elected Republican Insurance Commissioners opposed).
Unless your mom is a health policy wonk who doesn't know much about insurance, I would bet her new-found conservatism was more a function of age demographics (I'd bet she's a Baby Boomer or child of the 60s & 70s) than a sign of an imminent national rightward shift; After all, the Democrats just won their biggest landslide since LBJ with the most liberal presidential candidate we've seen in a generation (though, to be fair, Obama's far more "center" than he is "left"). My dad hasn't voted Republican in 24 years - and been a lifelong Democrat - but he voted for McCain, too. He said the same things that your mom said, too - but ultimately his behavior was pretty much exactly what I expected him to do, demographically.
And, demographically speaking, the only people trending further right are aging baby boomers (who will die sooner rather than later) and Southerners. So I wouldn't take either of our parents' conversion to McCain as a symptom of any sort of meaningful path for future conservatism to build on, but rather as a function of their age demographic and the voting behavior of similar Americans. A coalition of rural voters and Baby Boomers can't win when 65 percent of Americans under 60 are voting center-left
That's not to say the Republican party is doomed - Huckabee's economic populism (which, Fair Tax aside, amounts to the expansion of the Welfare state and is a far cry from your traditional free market conservatism) combined with a more socially permissive social agenda and a workable health-care reform would be quite formidable. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam posit the same policy prescription for Republicans in their book
Grand New Party. But this raises a troubling question (also raised by Andrew Sullivan when reviewing Douthat's book): Are the policy prescriptions Salam and Douthat note are necessary to rebuild the party actually conservative?
And I don't know the answer to that, though I'll confess that I'm thinking "No." And if I'm right, that suggests that Republicans are in a much worse position than most American conservatives are willing to admit.
-neal