From a reader:

“Then they cleared her with Dobson and a few other evangelicals who they mistakenly believed were perfectly good stand-ins for the entire conservative movement.”
Were I a betting man, which I’m not, inasmuch as I have no money to be with, I would wager large amounts of cash that this part of your theory is correct. I am a conservtive, a social conservative, a Christian, and a Christian who attends to services each Sunday and forces his 3-year-old to memorize verses from the Psalms. So I should be o.k., wouldn’t you think, with the news media treating Gary Baur and James Dobson as typical “conservatives” or, at the height of specificity, “social conservatives” — right? It drives me bananas! For a variety of reasons, I hold both these men to be twinkle-heads of the first order. (Indeed, after Baur endorsed McCain in 2000, clearly hoping to get a big post in a McCain administration, my wife took to hating him more than is healthy.) And now — so you suggest with great cogency — even the Bush administratins is doing it. I feel like those poor Scots who come to America have to endure people asking them how they do things in England. Ergh.