The political culture wars may be going the way of the fights over the oil embargo or the Soviet missile gap. Democrats have been de-emphasizing social issues for years, finding that their positions on abortion and gay rights didn’t play well with many centrists. They also discovered that expanding the Democratic tent to include more social conservatives has boosted their appeal in Southern and Western states. Candidates for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee debated early this month. Some Republicans now worry that their recent focus on issues like gay marriage, gun rights, and late-term abortions — considered a winning strategy for years — may have backfired in the past two campaigns. Now add in the financial crisis. With voters concerned about their finances to the near-exclusion of everything else, the next few elections are likely to revolve around jobs, stimulus and tax cuts, not abortion and gun rights. ‘It’s not to say these are just symbolic issues,’ said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and a former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind. But in a time of war and financial crisis, ‘people tend to focus on pragmatic […]