It was only a month ago that nervous Obama supporters believed that Sarah Palin’s addition to the Republican ticket could swing the election to John McCain. Some feared voters would be fooled by Palin’s “hockey mom” image, while pundits argued that she had replaced Barack Obama as the “next new thing” that voters crave. Well, Sarah Palin has made a major impact on this race, though McCain’s own problems and the accompanying economic collapse makes her specific contribution to the ticket’s decline harder to calculate. But here is what we know for sure: Palin’s selection was followed by a huge shift of women toward Obama, contributed to McCain’s rapid decline in Florida and among seniors, and represents a daily advertisement for McCain’s lack of judgment. Her attacks on Obama have undermined McCain’s pledge to run a substantive campaign, and her inability to appear outside right wing, pro-Bush crowds hampers McCain from securing independent voters. The best news for progressives, however, is that Palin is deepening divisions within the Republican Party, ensuring a post-election bloodbath that will weaken resistance to Obama’s initiatives in 2009.

Sarah Palin was picked for a short-term jolt, but her selection has come to have longterm implications. The McCain-Palin ticket is destroying the Wall Street-Christian right alliance that has resulted in nearly three decades of Republican dominance.

“Greed and Corruption on Wall Street”

This was Sarah Palin’s most frequently repeated line in her debate with Joe Biden, and it is a staple of her campaign appearances. The religious right has never been happy with their Wall Street allies, but accepted the alliance as a condition of their own ascension into power.

Palin’s rhetoric is driving a wedge between these twin pillars of the Republican Party. Her attacks, coupled with her lack of intellectual acumen and policy background, appears to be shifting what was once called the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party away from the religious right and toward supporting Democrats.

One of the least covered aspects of Sarah Palin is that she almost exclusively appears before crowds of far-right voters in communities that are solidly Republican. The New York Times finally addressed this on October 7, describing how those attending Palin’s Florida rallies were among the less than 25% of the population that thinks George W. Bush is doing a good job.

Palin is rallying this conservative base not to elect McCain, which even she knows is now a lost cause, but to position herself and her ideology at the center of a newly constituted Republican Party. This explains her increasingly incendiary attacks on Obama, which hurt McCain but help position Palin at the center of the post-2008 Republican Party.

The religious right clearly blames their Wall Street allies for the tarnishing of the Republican brand. And since they believe that “greed and corruption on Wall Street” is to blame for Obama’s victory, they prefer a “pure” Republican Party that excludes the corporate class.

That’s why Palin is happy to pursue a separate agenda from McCain, and why her supporters are not complaining about limiting her appearances to the rabid Republican base. The religious right has come to believe that Wall Street is an anathema to a resurgent GOP, so there is no point for Palin to court the corporate class and its “moderate” allies.

Republicans in Crisis

Does anyone believe that after John McCain loses in an electoral landslide, and secular-identified Republican Senators like Gordon Smith, Norm Coleman, John Sununu, Elizabeth Dole and Ted Stevens are defeated, that the religious right will want realign the Republican Party with Wall Street? Or that Sarah Palin will be content to govern Alaska and ignore the national right-wing base that adores her?

I don’t think so.

And that’s great news for those who fear that Republican opposition will prevent universal health care, a new energy policy, increased education funding, and the rest of the Obama platform.

Had McCain selected Mitt Romney as his running mate, the Republican’s religious right-corporate alliance could have come out of this election even stronger. But instead we got Palin, a decision that could boost progressive politics for years.

The Wall Street/prep school wing of the Republican Party is as unhappy with Palin as her base is with them. Former National Review and current New York Times columnist David Brooks said yesterday that Palin “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.”

Greed and corruption on one side, a fatal cancer on the other. And with nearly a month before Election Day, the Republican Party’s civil war is just beginning

Randy Shaw is Editor of Beyond Chron and author of the newly released, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century (University of California Press)