The ‘Huckabee Panic’ [View All]

It may be an exaggeration to say conservatives are having a major-league freak-out over the prospects of Mike Huckabee winning the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, but only slightly.

In the new issue of the Weekly Standard, conservative Stephen Hayes warns of the “perils of Huckaplomacy,” highlighting all of the many ways in which Huckabee seems to have a child-like understanding of international affairs. In the new issue of National Review, conservative Rich Lowry writes that Huckabee’s nomination “would represent an act of suicide by his party,” in large part because the Arkansan is “manifestly unprepared to be president of the United States.” Both Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan devoted parts of their columns yesterday expressing discomfort with Huckabee’s faith-based presidential campaign.

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At the risk of linking to Kevin Drum in every post, his reaction to this is right in line with mine.

s with blogosphere conservatives, mainstream conservatives are mostly urban sophisticates with a libertarian bent, not rural evangelicals with a social conservative bent. They’re happy to talk up NASCAR and pickup trucks in public, but in real life they mostly couldn’t care less about either. Ditto for opposing abortion and the odd bit of gay bashing via proxy. But when it comes to Ten Commandments monuments and end times eschatology, they shiver inside just like any mainstream liberal. The only difference is that usually they keep their shivering to themselves because they want to keep everyone in the big tent happy.

But then along comes Huckabee, and guess what? He’s the real deal. Not a guy like George Bush or Ronald Reagan, who talks a soothing game to the snake handlers but then turns around and spends his actual political capital on tax cuts, foreign wars, and deregulating big corporations. Huckabee, it turns out, isn’t just giving lip service to evangelicals, he actually believes all that stuff. Among other things, he believes in creationism (really believes), once proposed that AIDS patients should be quarantined, appears to share the traditional evangelical view that Mormonism is a cult, and says (in public!) that homosexuality is sinful. And that’s all without seeing the text of any of his old sermons, all of which he refuses to let the press lay eyes on.

Quite right. The Republican Party’s religious right base is supposed to be seen, not heard. Candidates are supposed to pander to this crowd, not actually come from this crowd. They’re supposed to be the foot-soldiers come Election Day, and then quietly sit back while the party directs its attention to billionaires, oil companies, and the neocons.

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