Of course, Southern evangelicals may not be looking for a candidate with Hindu credentials, I told Huntsman. But he insisted that issues like religion are ultimately “just campaign sideshows.” ~McKay Coppins

He does understand that he is going to be running in the Republican presidential primaries, right?

I will be the first to argue that the power of Christian conservatives is not as great as many people outside the GOP seem to think, and I agree that much of what Republican politicians offer Christian conservatives is little more than meaningless symbolism and lip service. However, it is because Christian conservative voters are taken for granted (and more important, many of them feel taken for granted), their main issues are not priorities for the party leadership, and their interests are not served by the party’s agenda that the symbolic appeals and lip service have become so important. Bush won the loyalty of a lot of evangelical voters by identifying with them publicly on a somewhat regular basis, and it was that identification that mattered more than anything else he proposed to do or did while in office*. Many Christian conservative voters know that they’re being had, but they at least want to hear their politicians pretend to share their convictions, and they’re even more enthusiastic when the politicians actually do share them. Let me suggest that a candidate who says that he gets “satisfaction from many different types of philosophies” is not going to get anywhere with very many of these voters.

Leave aside Huntsman’s professed religion for the moment. I am fairly confident that there are very few Christian conservative voters who will be excited by someone as “ecumenical” as Huntsman. Holding different religious beliefs is one thing. That might alienate a lot of religious conservatives if they hold different beliefs, but at least there would be some clear idea of what it is that the candidate believes. The “many different types of philosophies” position will leave a lot of people cold, because it sounds as if he is avoiding the question, and to some people’s ears it makes him sound as if he has no firm convictions. Notice that Huntsman doesn’t even attempt to make the “values” argument that Romney and his supporters make, because he seems to believe that appealing to voters on the basis of “values” is a campaign sideshow. It isn’t a sideshow. For large numbers of Republican voters, it is the main event. It is the reason why they vote Republican in spite of everything. Dismissing religion as a sideshow tells these voters that not only is Huntsman not “one of them,” which they may have already known, but that their understandings of politics are dramatically different. More and more, I am getting the impression that Huntsman 2012 (assuming that it happens) is going to follow McCain’s script in 2000 of running against all of the things in the party that “centrists” and moderates don’t like (e.g., religion in politics, social conservatism, opposition to mass immigration, etc.).

* Isn’t this proof that religious identity politics is harmful to the selection of qualified, knowledgeable nominees? Absolutely! Still, that is the way these things seem to work.