Both Ross Douthat and Peter Beinart have some pretty solid pieces on the 'culture wars.
Beinart:
In the 1990s, things began to change. Crime declined, welfare was radically scaled back, and affirmative action receded from the political stage, in part because of the deep support it enjoyed from such conservative bastions as corporate America and the military. But the culture war didn't end: It simply morphed from a struggle primarily about race to a struggle primarily about religion. In the 1990s, as the affirmative action, crime, and welfare debates subsided, the void was partly filled by gay marriage, an issue that pits not black against white, but secular against religiously orthodox. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was not a racial battle, but a battle over what standard of public morality would govern political behavior. Bill Clinton's legacy, noted political scientists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, was to relieve some of the racial anxiety that white working-class voters felt about the Democratic Party but substitute for it a new moral anxiety, felt most acutely by whites who regularly attended church.
For Barack Obama, this shift has been useful. A black politician running in the midst of a racial culture war is virtually doomed. But amidst a religious culture war, being black is less of a handicap since blacks are the least secular element of the Democratic coalition. Barack Obama was more successful than John Kerry in reaching out to moderate white evangelicals in part because he struck them as more authentically Christian.
Douthat (in response):
...what makes Obama promising to liberals isn't his potential to "end" culture-war battles - it's his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religiose language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear. So waiting a day to reverse the ban on overseas funding for groups that provide abortions, for instance, isn't a compromise in the culture wars, or an act of moderation - it's a way of making a victory for the left seem like an act of moderation to people who aren't that invested in the issue.
