Jacob Weisberg discusses what you have to "believe in" to even have a shot at running as a Republican these days. I put that in quotes because I find it hard to believe that most of these folks actually believe all the red state/red meat stuff they have to say.
An awful lot of it's like flag-burning. Remember a few years ago when to hear most Republicans tell it, the most important thing in the world was to pass a Constitutional Amendment to prevent one or two yahoos a year from burning our nation's flag? I believe this was a bit before the most important thing in the world was to keep a poor, brain-dead woman named Terri Schiavo "alive" on a technicality. For six months or so, you were not a good and true American if you weren't ready to compromise the First Amendment to stop the burning of all those flags no one was burning.
And then that just went away.
As a means of firing up the G.O.P. base and demonizing Democrats, the matter proved to be legless and everyone forgot about it. Heard any Congressfolks or Senators speak out lately about the dire need to protect Old Glory from Bic® lighters? Of course not. They don't care about it now and they didn't care about it then. Just as most of them don't care about stopping the teaching of evolution or preventing gays from marrying or any of that social/moral stuff. But they have to pretend…and maybe some of them even reach that stage where something inside them decides it's easier to believe what you have to say than to not believe it.
It's probably a lot easier these days to be a Democratic office-holder or office-seeker. You don't have to believe strongly in anything.