Another blow to the imagined Giuliani-Huckabee juggernaut: Club for Growth President Pat Toomey draws a line in the sand and declares Huckabee totally unacceptable as a veep nominee.  So a certain claim that Huckabee was “acceptable to all factions” wasn’t strictly accurate. 

It must be gratifying for the head of an organisation that doesn’t actually win many primary contests to throw its weight about in the ’08 race.  Who knows?  This may have some significant impact.  The spectacle of leading fiscal conservatives declaring Huckabee to be the political equivalent of a leper while the social conservatives hem and haw over whether or not they will actually reject Giuliani is an object lesson in the real priorities of the GOP and the conservative coalition.  When push comes to shove, keeping taxes down is a lot more important than protecting life, and the people who are concerned about the latter are supposed to suffer being ignored meekly and put up no resistance.  If you have ever raised tax once, even if it was to repair what were once Arkansas’ decrepit highways (and as someone who used to have to drive on them every year, let me tell you, they used to be really bad), you are an outcast.  That this gets everything entirely backwards with respect to the relative electoral strength of the different factions within the GOP is obvious: the social-cons bring in a lot more voters and put up with a lot more deviations from their preferred positions than economic conservatives ever have. 

Yet, not surprisingly, the party of corporations and the moneyed interest will sooner pay attention to the econo-cons and tell social conservatives to be quiet and play nice.  This may be the cycle when social conservatives have finally had enough.  Time will tell.