David Brooks ruins a good argument with this:

Back in 2006, they [talk radio hosts] threatened to build a new majority on anti-immigration fervor. Republicans like J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf, both of Arizona, built their House election campaigns under that banner. But these two didn’t march to glory. Both lost their campaigns.

This is at best misleading. It remains true that immigration restriction will never win elections on its own, and it is also true that candidates who present themselves as nothing other than restrictionists are not going to win in the absence of any other compelling message. Hayworth and Graf were primarily restrictionist candidates, and they lost during an incredibly bad year for their party. There were more than a few supporters of “comprehensive reform” that also lost that year, because voters repudiated the GOP mostly because of the war that almost all Republicans, including both restrictionists and pro-amnesty types, continued to support. This is the real weakness of the Republican Party that Brooks can never bring himself to acknowledge in his analysis. It does not help make his case against both popular and populist conservatism, because most mainstream conservatives of all stripes are implicated in this foreign policy failure, and few more so than Brooks himself.

What Brooks fails to mention is that McCain and Huckabee did as well as they did during the primaries partly by avoiding the issue of immigration or, in Huckabee’s case, by simply reversing his immigration stance. How many times did McCain claim that he had “learned his lesson” from backlash in 2007? Of course, he had learned only that he and his allies could not be as obvious in their contempt for rank-and-file conservatives. In any event, he ignored immigration throughout the primaries and the general election, because he knew that there were no votes to be won by talking about his record. One moment Huckabee was the media darling, a folksy “compassionate” conservative who spoke to the NEA and defended mass immigration, and the next he attempted to make himself a populist firebrand aligned with the Minutemen and Chuck Norris. Furthermore, the problems most mainstream conservatives claimed to have with Huckabee concerned his fiscal record and his flirtations with foreign policy realism. Penalizing that sort of “deviationism” would likely not trouble Brooks quite so much. Brooks also fails to mention that the candidate favored by many of Brooks’ reformist conservatives, Giuliani, flamed out even more spectacularly than Thompson. As out of touch and unrepresentative as Limbaugh et al. may be, the reformists are even more so.

That said, Brooks’ larger point concerning the last primary contest is valid. Conservative activists and talk radio hosts are not representative of Republican voters in many of their policy views and their candidate preferences. They tried to shove obviously flawed candidates down the throats of primary voters by applying inconsistent, changing standards of “purity” to different candidates. What made Huckabee’s fiscal record absolutely unacceptable was irrelevant when judging Romney, and McCain’s minimal compromises on life issues were far less important than Romney and Giuliani’s complete lack of credibility. Activists and radio hosts responded well to the candidates that paid homage to them and deferred to them, and they were deeply opposed to the candidates who usually paid them little attention and fed off of positive mainstream media coverage. What the primaries showed was not merely the illusory political power of the talk show hosts, but they also showed that movement leaders and institutions had remarkably limited influence over Republican primary voters.

Speaking of myths that are constantly re-woven, the myth that the GOP is dominated and directed by its most conventionally conservative members, which movement conservatives promote to exaggerate their own importance, is one that Brooks must find very useful. What the primaries showed was that those who are most self-consciously movement conservatives have limited power in a party they claim to define, and they are forced to settle for whatever opportunistic, accommodating moderate Republican politicians happen to come along. Once the latter start to use all the right buzzwords, movement conservatives will engage in any number of contortions to rationalize support for politicians who routinely play them for fools.