A significant fraction of evangelical voters appear more likely to ignore the candidates' specific economic and foreign policy platforms in favor of concerns about gay marriage or abortion.

How can I play baseball when I'm worried about foreign policy?

Southerners focus on the social hot-button issues, like abortion and gay marriage. But Indiana, like Iowa or Wisconsin or Ohio, is more interested in the traditional Republican issues - balancing the budget, integrity in government. It's a much more humble kind of state.

Foreign policy is about the execution of ideas as much as their formulation.

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

I believe the GOP should pitch its big-top tent around fiscal conservatism and a muscular foreign policy rather than carnival bark outside the sideshow tents of gay marriage and reproductive choice.