For me at least, Mike Huckabee is probably the least objectionable of the Republican candidates. Given that Huckabee is on record calling for the quarantining of AIDS patients, this only highlights the extremely poor quality of his fellow Republican candidates. But is the Republican establishment, founded as it is on support for big business and the military, ready for somebody like Huckabee? In other words, would a Huckabee candidacy expose the shallowness of the official support for “social conservatism” in these circles?
And there is indeed a great deal of growing discontent with Huckabee, over at the National Review among other places (is it because he is not a zealous torture supporter?) Over to Kevin Drum:
“As 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….. I think this brand of yahooism puts off mainstream urban conservatives every bit as much as it does mainstream urban liberals. They’re afraid that this time, it’s not just a line of patter to keep the yokels in line.”
Drum has a point.
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