like to think of politics more as geology than political science. If you look at the political landscape through right-here, right-now vision, you get political science.
But if you look for the shifting of great political plates, as happens to the earth's subsurface and its surface, you get politics as geography, and, in the long run, that is a more accurate and lasting picture.
Look at the liberals who opposed Vietnam but backed our intrusion in Kosovo, or the conservatives who were hawks in Southeast Asia but against the Kosovo operation, and you see whole political plates flip-flopping.
This comes to mind as I watch the Republican Party - here in New Hampshire and nationally - try to find its perch on the high ground thrust up by the latest upheaval of plates. The problem for the Republicans is that the party's most staunch conservatives - whom columnist Charles Krauthammer says his friend Evan Thomas calls the ''wing-nuts'' of the party - are ''peeling off.'' The upheaval of plates has been too much for them and they can't gain purchase on this new ground.
Granted, some have. Tom Oliphant, a Globe colleague, wrote last week that ''many conservatives are averting their gaze in the rush to climb aboard the cash-heavy bandwagon of President-in-waiting Bush.''
The latter is not a phenomenon unique to the outer wing of the Republican Party. Recall that many liberal Democrats had to hold their noses to vote for Bill Clinton - he of the Democratic Leadership Council, meant to be a conservative antidote to the days of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson.
And in New Hampshire, many a liberal Democrat still wrestles with looking the other way on Governor Jeanne Shaheen's stances on taxes and education.
But it is conservative Republicans who are in the grip right now, and Senator Bob Smith, for the moment, is at the pincer-tip of their torture.
He feels the party has deserted him, lost sight of its foundation built on the bricks of cutting government, protecting America's borders, gun ownership, and a rigid antiabortion stance that he would apply to the selection of judges.
Others feel Smith has deserted the party and the people who voted for him as a Republican. But the fact is, the senator perhaps most famous for waving a rubber fetus on the floor of the US Senate has gone off to run for president representing either some as-yet-unnamed party, or a splinter party in search of a candidate.
For now, we'll call it the BOB Party, though BOB could stand for many things.
Like Boy, Oh Boy - which is how his decision to quit the Republicans is being greeted by those who like him and those who dislike him within the party.
Boy, Oh Boy as in: We sure are glad to see this rock-ribbed conservative stand up for what is right and moral and decent about our party, a party that has lost its way for the sake of political expediency.
Or Boy, Oh Boy as in: We sure are glad that this senator, who was too far out there for a party trying to sell a compassionate middle ground, has left our ranks and we don't have to be associated with him anymore. It's not unlike the Major League Baseball official who said of a recent threat by the umpires to resign on Sept. 1 that it is a possibility either to be ignored or welcomed.
Smith's new party - Bob, Our Bob - will take a handful of true believers with him. The Union Leader has already run citizen letters to that effect, and some of his staffers will follow him into the political desert.
In some ways, I cannot blame the man for breaking away based on his beliefs. Personally, it is probably the right decision. Politically, he is heading into the vapor.
Babies Over Butchery - that's the BOB Party - and that's what they call abortion, which they are against. Under Ronald Reagan, that's the stance the Republican Party took. But it was so much lip-service because they knew they were sailing into a stiff wind from the opposite direction and that only deft political tacking would let them make headway, particularly with women. But much of the party has decided now to run downwind or just let the sails luff, and that leaves a small flotilla - the BOB Navy - out there still tacking away.
BOB - Bullets Our Birthright - sticks to its guns in a way even many Republicans no longer dare. Never mind the school shootings that garner so much television time. Americans, many of them firm believers that most sane, law-abiding folks should be able to own guns if they want them, long ago agreed in large numbers that there need to be some limits on who, when, where, why and how easily we can buy those guns. Most members of my family hunt or have hunted, have even helped feed their kids through some tough winters that way. So I've got no problem with guns in general, as long as they are used in ways for which they are intended. But if we need to check out peoples' intent before they can have guns, so be it. Here, BOB is out of step.
Barricade Our Borders is another BOBism. In a burgeoning global economy, it's not just foreign goods coming here, it's our jobs going there. Throwing up cultural and economic fences is walling out potential, not improving our lot.
But perhaps what most drives the BOB Party is this: Bleating Over Bush. I mean, here's this guy who's done nothing besides be governor of Texas, who is rolling in dough and endorsements, while the head of the BOB Party, when he was still a Republican, went almost unnoticed running for president in his own state.
So Senator Smith goes to Washington and swaps GOP for BOB.
It's been tried before in New Hampshire. Meldrim Thomson Jr. did it in 1970 after a moderate Republican Party rejected him as its candidate for governor in favor of Walter Peterson. The Southerner Thomson - shades of John Birch and George Wallace dripping all over him like Spanish moss - bolted to the American Party and promptly got nowhere. Came skulking back to Mr. Loeb's Plantation and his proper place in the GOP in 1972 and caught another shift in the political plates and rode it to the governor's office.
It was a shift, driven by The Pledge against broad-based taxes that would hold stable for nearly 30 years - short in geologic terms, but long in political ones.
Royal Ford is a member of the Globe Staff. His e-mail address is ford@globe.com
