The GOP white-glove crowd on Huckabee: "O Lord, NO!"

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/11582

The GOP white-glove crowd on Huckabee: "O Lord, NO!"
by Weldon Berger


National Review editor Rich Lowry is joining what threatens to become a parade of GOP flacks and hacks who wish all GOP voters were like Mike Huckabee—bone ignorant, Pavlovian Christians who can swallow the wildest swerves of logic with nary a hint of nausea—but are more than a bit panicked to find Huckabee threatening for the GOP presidential nomination and turning the primaries into a contest over who's God bone is biggest. Here's Lowry.

Huckabee has declared that he doesn’t believe in evolution. Even if there are many people in America who agree with him, his position would play into the image of Republicans as the anti-science party. This would tend to push away independents and upper-income Republicans. In short, Huckabee would take a strength of the GOP and, through overplaying it, make it a weakness.

In other words, pander but don't empower. Get Huckabee aboard the bus but for God's sake don't let him drive.

Lowry, because he retains a modicum of self-consciousness, doesn't directly abhor the role of religion in the Republican meltdown. Peggy Noonan, because she doesn't, does. Lowry does delicately skirt the question of how the GOP acquired its "anti-science party" image, which is of course by way of ridiculing any science that respectively conflicts with popular religious beliefs, interferes with corporate prerogatives, or doesn't involve blowing things up.

He also takes care to throw in some policy-related objections, observing that Huckabee, unlike his fellow candidates who wholeheartedly support the greatest national security debacle since the War of 1812, "not only has zero national-security credentials, he basically has no foreign-policy advisers either, as a New York Times Magazine piece this Sunday makes clear." (How is it, by the way, that every pundit and reporter in the land read that story a week before publication?)

This is in contrast to, for instance, Rudy Giuliani, who boasts Norman "Nuke Iran" Podhoretz as his go-to guy on national security.

Huckabee's record on taxes is another policy sore spot. The Bible-struck populist raised taxes in Arkansas for the shady purpose of helping poor people, and Lowry fears that his repentant gimmick—"a sales-tax scheme that allows him to say he supports eliminating the IRS, but is so wildly implausible that it would be a liability in a general election"—isn't sufficient to overcome the fears of those same upper-income Republicans who detest Huckabee's insistent religiosity, in this instance because they recognize, as Lowry says, that "the public tends to support Democratic proposals for bigger government, which Republicans counter by saying that the proposals will require higher taxes."

But Republicans like Lowry have demonstrated time and again that they can stomach any policy perversion so long as it doesn't cost elections, and Huckabee's tax scheme is really no weirder than most Republican attempts to dodge reality on the subject. The real problem is that Huckabee represents an entire class of people whom Lowry is happy to goad to the polls every four years in support of whoever his chosen candidate might be, with whatever rhetorical gymnastics that requires, but with whom he otherwise wants nothing to do.

Tough break, Rich.

[MrScorpio]

1. Huckabee's greatest qualification to be president is that God told him that he could

And of course, if he were find himself to be in the Oval Office with the Lord Almighty guiding his every decision, all I have to say is God help us all.

[babylonsister]

2. I know! I think he's one scary dude myself. While I don't

believe any rethug can beat a Dem, his soaring popularity is frightening.

[tularetom]

3. Hucklebuck scares the country club republicans shitless

If he gets nominated all the pro bidness repubs will break ranks and vote Democratic particularly if a corporate leaning Dem like HRC is the nominee. I could almost guarantee you they would rather have a nice amenable easy to control Dem in the WH than a wacked out religious fanatic that would go around attacking Wall Street, outlawing abortion, censoring movies and TV etc.

[TalkingDog]

4. Woo-Hoo! Sounds like a Party to me!

"go around attacking Wall Street, outlawing abortion, censoring movies and TV etc."

I say let him be the candidate. Hell, let him win. He can set policy, he can veto bills, but unless Shrub makes a few more signing statements before he "leaves office", ol' Huck will never be able to MAKE LAWS...because hopefully we'll still have a Democratic majority.

Look what happened when they outlawed abortion in South Dakota. It took voters, the PEOPLE, what...less than 6 months to squash that misbegotten idiocy. And by a decent margin too.

I'm just pissed off enough to want to watch them shit their pants when their pet monkey starts biting them square on the nuts.

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