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He Also Cannot Turn Lead Into Gold

The rest of the country is looking, it seems, for a President who can end the war in Iraq and move on to addressing a litany of domestic concerns; the Republican base, though, is looking for a President who can win the war in Iraq, and that’s not a contest that Mike Huckabee is equipped […]

The rest of the country is looking, it seems, for a President who can end the war in Iraq and move on to addressing a litany of domestic concerns; the Republican base, though, is looking for a President who can win the war in Iraq, and that’s not a contest that Mike Huckabee is equipped for. ~Ross Douthat

Ross gives a good sense of Huckabee’s strengths and weaknesses as a candidate.  What has struck me about his campaign is that Huckabee has failed to mention one of his biggest social conservative “achievements” of promoting so-called “covenant marriage.”  Romney talks all day long about strengthening families, and even McCain gets in on the pro-family act when he says some random thing about “preserving our American family,” but unlike most of the crowd Huckabee can plausibly claim that he has been actively encouraging stable, lasting marriages–the sort of positive, obviously beneficial social conservatism that would distinguish him from the crowd.  Arguably, he didn’t do all that much–he signed the bill into law and promoted the idea–and it didn’t have all that great of an effect, but it has to be at least as symbolically valuable as raging against gay “marriage.”

Ross is absolutely right that the GOP base, or least most of it, wants someone who will win the Iraq war.  It is also the case that, like everyone who has fantastic, unrealistic expectations, they will be horribly disappointed and embittered when such a candidate does not materialise.  Even so, I take Ross’ point that the GOP primaries will turn on questions of foreign policy and national security.  Huckabee clearly has no qualifications here, but then again neither do Romney and Giuliani.  If the Republicans are looking for an experienced national security candidate and a supposedly war-winning President, they would have to rally around someone like McCain or Duncan Hunter.  This is why I retain the small expectation that Hunter will fare reasonably well in the primaries: he has the requisite experience in government on these matters and he isn’t McCain.

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