fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

No Insurgents Available

If I were a Republican, I’d ignore the inane Palin debate and start looking around for a politician who had the good sense to break with the bipartisan consensus and oppose the bailout bill before it passed. Then I’d start planning an insurgency. ~Jesse Walker That would rule out Pawlenty. Outside of Congress, as far […]

If I were a Republican, I’d ignore the inane Palin debate and start looking around for a politician who had the good sense to break with the bipartisan consensus and oppose the bailout bill before it passed. Then I’d start planning an insurgency. ~Jesse Walker

That would rule out Pawlenty. Outside of Congress, as far as I know there were only two reasonably prominent Republicans who opposed the bailout, and these were Huckabee and, more or less, Mark Sanford. In the Senate, Shelby was a leading opponent, and there are a few leading House Republicans who can say the same, but none of them immediately strikes me as a presidential contender. In the end, one of them might have to be the populists’ candidate for lack of alternatives.

In the past, I floated the idea that Huckabee would be in the best position to take advantage of anti-bailout sentiment, which he could tie to his normal pseudo-populist rhetoric to lend it some substance. While his move to the right on immigration was sudden, belated and opportunistic, he did move that way early in the primaries. He has much more credibility among social conservatives and evangelicals than virtually any other likely candidate. However, the anti-Huckabee forces among activists and interest groups are influential and they loathe the man with a passion that is hard to understand. Unless I have missed other leading Republican bailout opponents, that leaves Sanford, who was critical of the bailout but not entirely hostile. However, he seems a very unlikely candidate to lead a libertarian populist insurgency.

In the same way that leading Republicans tied themselves to or did not oppose the war, most did the same with the bailout. This leaves a very small pool of future candidates not tainted by this last in a string of terrible policies of the current administration, and it is already taken for granted that the best-known of these, Huckabee, is unacceptable to a lot of donors and activists. Thanks to the capitulation of its leading members to the administration on the bailout and the powerful opposition to Huckabee, the GOP is doomed to have the inane Palin debate and debates like it, and it can look forward to another weak field of presidential candidates.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here