The phony victimization of Mike Huckabee
Rod Dreher buys the claim that Huckabee is the victim of an elitist conservative backlash:
It's funny, but when it looked like Rudy Giuliani, a social liberal, was going to be the nominee, we didn't see many, if any, establishment Republican opinion leaders freaking out over what kind of danger to the future of the party and the nation he represented….I think it's fair to say that it was assumed that Giuliani would be a sound representative of the Republican Party, and that the social and religious conservatives would do like they always do and get in line….But lo, it turns out that the candidate who's caught fire comes straight out of the religious/social conservative wing of the coalition, and he is unsound on issues most important to the fiscal wing. It's not supposed to work that way. Nobody at the elite level seems to expect the economic conservatives to suck it up for the sake of party unity. What does that say about the place of social conservatives in the party all these years?
I don't want to overdo this. I think it's perfectly fine to be worried about Huckabee's vagueness, and his unpreparedness. I'm worried about these things too, which is a big reason why I can't say I'd vote for him….Still, it's hard to shake the belief that the real problem with Mike Huckabee, as far as the establishment is concerned, is that he's not clubbable.
Dreher has overlooked the fact that when National Review (a prime target of Huckabee's grievance against what he calls the conservative "chattering class") endorsed Mitt Romney, it dismissed Huckabee and Giuliani in the same paragraph and on the same theory -- that both would "pull apart" the Republican base.
Dreher also ignores the fact that, unlike Giuliani, Huckabee is squishy (at a minimum) on a broad array of traditional conservative issues and concerns. George Will probably exaggerates (as he has in criticizing certain other Republican candidates) when he writes that Huckabee "represents wholesale repudiation of. . .Reaganism." But it is the justified fear that there's some truth in this assertion -- and not elitism -- that drives conservative criticism of Huckabee.
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