Via Jim Antle, I see that Georg Neumayr has let fly against the Huckabashers, making many of the arguments I have advanced over the last couple of months.  Neumayr concludes:

But won’t Huckabee shatter the conservative coalition? That would be a little more persuasive if those saying this hadn’t shattered it themselves. The relative success of Ron Paul and Huckabee is not a cause of the coalition’s collapse but a reflection of it. An excessively Wilsonian foreign policy has divided defense conservatives; years of big spending has divided economic conservatives; and a tepid, stalling social conservatism has alienated moral ones.

Perhaps Huckabee can’t rebuild this coalition. But he isn’t likely to weaken it any more than have his critics, and he may even bring some long-disenchanted middle Americans into it.

The double standards for Huckabee and the other leading contenders are noticeable, especially when they are being applied by people who made excuses or at least looked the other way during one of the most liberal administrations of the last thirty years.  As I said earlier this week:

The new story about Huckabee is that he is so un-conservative that he isn’t even as conservative as Bush, whom they now reject as non-conservative.  What seems to be troubling these establishment critics of Huckabee is that he is no less conservative than Bush, and may be more so in some respects, but all of a sudden they have discovered a deep wellspring of uncompromising principle that does not allow them to tolerate Huckabee, even as they have cheered on Bush for seven years.  This is an almost Romneyesque discovery of first principles in its novelty, and it is a bit hard to take seriously if you have been opposed to Bush from the beginning.  

With a little under a third of the vote counted and reported, McCain has won New Hampshire by a large margin, and Romney has already conceded.  Clinton currently leads, but her lead has been shrinking over the last half an hour.  Paul is close to catching Giuliani, but frankly Giuliani should have been doing worse than he is.  A fourth place finish for Giuliani is not very good, but losing to Ron Paul again would have a certain symbolic significance.  For Paul, picking up fourth place is important.   

Here’s a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier today (via Yglesias):

When asked about a Palestinian state, Gov. Huckabee stated that he supports creating a Palestinian state, but believes that it should be formed outside of Israel. He named Egypt and Saudi Arabia as possible alternatives, noting that the Arabs have far more land than the Israelis and that it would only be fair for other Arab nations to give the Palestinians land for a state, rather than carving it out of the tiny Israeli state.

Huckabee’s frequent references to “Islamofascism” and now his adoption of an ultra position on the Palestinians are meant to placate the critics who believe that his foreign policy agenda is either too thin, too naive, too weak or too liberal (or some combination of these).  “Transferring” (a.k.a. forcibly expelling) Palestinians to various Arab countries is a curious way to have U.S. foreign policy “change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out.”  Who would have guessed that this meant adopting a harsher tone and attitude towards Arabs?  Perhaps that will be Huckabee’s new mantra: Reach out and strike someone.  Huckabee has taken this rather dreadful position of his own accord–just imagine what he would be willing to embrace once “national security” conservatives started supporting and advising him.  Not only would a position like this make him a natural fit for the “new fusionist” alliance of social conservatives and neocons, but in its injustice and hubris it is actually even worse than the current administration.

And yet, Romney, the candidate with the most executive experience, is fated to wake up one morning and realize that he just ran the worst campaign since Phil Gramm’s.  Romney will have spent $100 million or more wrecking his reputation! That takes work. It is all worthy of a Harvard Business Review analysis someday. ~Rich Karlgaard

Karlgaard also makes the right point about Huckabee and the Fair Tax, and the same one I was making earlier:

His Fair Tax would devastate lots of small businesses, such as retail stores, restaurants and realties.

This is frankly why I don’t understand how Karlgaard can also say that Huckabee has “boxed himself in with his populism.”  If anything, he has boxed himself in with his advocacy for a crazy tax plan that hurts small business and middle-class households, but he seems to be persuading middle and lower-middle class voters that he is “one of them,” even when his policies do not benefit them.  It is Thompsonesque phony populism at its best, and it seems to be working.  Granted, he makes a lot of noise about being against Wall Street, but where is the evidence is that he is?  It seems to me that if corporate Republicans could get someone who promised to get rid of corporate and capital gains taxes in exchange for calling them names once in a while, they would take him.  The crucial flaw in Karlgaard’s analysis is the assumption that most voters will understand that his tax plan harms small businesses.

My American Scene colleague Peter Suderman responded to my post on Huckabee and the GOP coalition:

This doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly odd claim, and Huckabee’s rhetoric has essentially admitted it. He’s railed against the Club for Growth, talked up his Main Street/Wall Street dichotomy, and has campaign manager Ed Rollins going around feeding reporters string about the demise of the Reagan coalition.  He’s been openly pushing religious conservatives to view business-minded economic conservatives as antagonists.

I think Peter has misunderstood what I meant.  Huckabee’s campaign chairman has declared the Reagan coalition dead, but in this he is simply observing that the death has already occurred, and it does not mean that the existing GOP coalition must be destroyed for Huckabee to win the nomination.  That is, the current GOP coalition is no longer really the Reagan coalition.  It isn’t even entirely the coalition that voted for the GOP in 1994.  My point, which may have been lost in the mix, was that Armey conflates “the Reagan coalition” and the current Republican coalition, when they are not the same thing.  Were it not for the totemic significance attached to the name of Reagan, nothing would be very controversial about the observation that a voting coalition of two decades ago was no longer relevant to the debate.  Romney’s candidacy has been based on the nostalgic hope that the two are the same and that he can twist himself into the right shape to satisfy the old coalition, so it is perhaps natural that those who continue to perpetuate the idea that the modern GOP is the embodiment of Reaganism are among those least offended by his contortions.  While our friends in the Beltway have continued to ride the old horse of “fusionism,” fusionism has long since ceased to describe how most Republicans and self-styled conservatives see things (to the extent that it ever did earlier).  Much as I have derided it for its flaws, what Joseph Bottum called the “new fusionism” serves as the umbrella term that covers the current structure of the movement and the current makeup of the GOP coalition.  Bottum wrote:

The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right–this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene [bold mine-DL]. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals.  

Now Huckabee has emerged as the masked liberal (perhaps we can call him El Burro), and suddenly this has become a very bad thing for people who have supported the current administration.  As one of those “angry isolationist paleoconservatives,” I find it amusing that it is now the GOP establishment that “mutters darkly” against just these things when they attack Huckabee, who in most respects is the ideal new fusionist candidate.  That is also, of course, why he should give all serious conservatives a feeling of dread.  These kinds of fusionism always work out poorly for the religious conservatives who join in them.  Such fusionism is, as I have said before, “a corrupt bargain that entails that the traditionalist and Christian members of the alliance give up 95% of what they want to their secular, globalist and interventionist fellows in exchange for the latter suffering to grant them a place at the table and an occasional appointment or rhetorical tip of the hat to keep them quiescent.”  

Bottum said almost a year and a half ago:

In the new fusionism of the pro-life social conservatives and the foreign-policy neoconservatives, a number of traditional issues seem, if not to have disappeared, then at least to have gotten muted along the way. Where exactly is tax reform and social security and the balanced budget in all this? Where is much concern for economics, which once defined the root of American conservatism?

I questioned back then whether “concern for economics” ever defined the root of American conservatism (I still seriously doubt this), but clearly the problem economic conservatives have with Huckabee is that they perceive him as someone who does not pay much attention to their issues and, when he does, they don’t like what they hear.  One of my points about the FairTax is that Huckabee’s support for it should demonstrate that Huckabee is not actually hostile to economic conservatives.  And while not all economic conservatives are Club for Growth and WSJ types, I grant you, these are the ones who are making the loudest noises about Huckabee, and they certainly are very often (if not 100% of the time) “in sync with the short-term interests of big business.”  I think they would not consider it undesirable to be described in that way.  I might have added that the sheer incoherence of his ideas and lack of policy expertise make him the perfect candidate for economic conservatives to mould in directions they like, just as national security conservatives should be unfazed by his inclinations towards realism and sanity.  It is because his economic and foreign policy ideas are so incoherent and unformed that he is someone who can be brought over to your views.  Consider how readily he has become a supporter of restrictionist ideas out of utter opportunism. 

My larger point was that Huckabee actually presents much less of a threat to economic conservatives than they suppose.  It seems to me that, in their indignation that one of the non-anointed candidates has started succeeding where the chosen ones have failed, establishment Republicans have started applying a kind of rigour to litmus tests on fiscal records that they would not apply in other cases.  If Huckabee’s Cato grade was a D, Romney’s was a C, yet we are gamely told by those who endorse Romney that he is much better as an economic conservative than Huckabee, when the truth is that, by the high standards of Cato and CfG, both are woefully lacking.  The difference is that Romney is a corporate Republican and will be quite glad to work in the interests of corporations, while Huckabee manifestly is not.  That makes Romney more reliable, even if it does not make him any more conservative on economics and fiscal policy (and could conceivably make him less so if he pushes something akin to the Medicare Part D boondoggle on the country).  It is a strange world where the governor who signed off on universal government-mandated health care is considerd by some to be the best “full-spectrum conservative,” while Huckabee is supposedly so deeply flawed that he would split the coalition beyond repair.

As usual, Hewitt is annoyed that people are not giving enough respect to his dear Mitt:

I heard one bit of punditry passed from microphone to microphone yesterday: If Romney doesn’t win in New Hampshire, he’s finished.

This assessment isn’t asserted about Hillary, who also planned to win early.  It isn’t asserted about Mike Huckabee, Thompson or Rudy.  It wasn’t asserted about Hillary, McCain, Rudy or Thompson after Iowa.

If no one is saying anything about Fred Thompson’s chances after New Hampshire (where he stands to get somewhere between 2 and 3%), that’s because everyone has already stopped paying much attention to the poor man.  After all, why keep kicking a man when he’s down?  Giuliani and Clinton, who could well be finished after tonight, don’t receive the same treatment because they still have significant leads in February 5 states and until recently had decent leads in national polling (the latter have since evaporated).  Romney’s strategy was explicitly a traditional early-state strategy that required him to do well in the initial contests.  Only after Iowa did his minions begin talking about his “national strategy.”  The media narrative that Huckabee won because “it was the evangelicals wot did it” also frees him of any obligation to perform very well in a much more secular, left-leaning and culturally libertarian state.  Every time someone has pointed out that Romney performs better in non-evangelical electorates than Huckabee, they were setting up the fraud for a fall–the implication then becomes that Romney really needs to win in a state with relatively few evangelicals while he can and his failure to do so is very bad news for him.  

This claim is made about Romney because he was the presumptive frontrunner in both Iowa and New Hampshire just two months ago, and retained his New Hampshire lead until last month.  People make this assessment because Massachusetts politicians almost always win the New Hampshire primary, and because Romney has spent an embarrassingly large amount of money building up his campaign in the state.  If he is upended by McCain, he will have been defeated by a candidate written off by everyone just a couple months ago as doomed–losing to the guy that appears doomed doesn’t help one’s reputation for electability.  People make this claim because Romney and his people have been making Muskie-esque guarantees of performance in New Hampshire in particular, essentially guaranteeing victory.  (They have been running away from these predictions, but just today Romney expressed confidence in winning.)  The same logic would have applied to Huckabee had he lost Iowa: people would have said that if he can’t win there, he can’t win anywhere.  If Romney can’t win in New Hampshire, it is hard to see how he prevails elsewhere.  This is what he has said about McCain, but it applies just as well to him.

Jim Antle and I are on the same page here:

Now I’m going to end up with the Thomas Boswell problem if Mitt Romney pulls out a win tonight, but he’s starting to look like the Mo Udall of this election cycle.

Tim Lee agrees that Huckabee is a competitive general election candidate, and he makes an excellent point about Huckabee’s religiosity:

I think a lot of members of the liberal (and libertarian) secular elite have a weird blind spot when it comes to religion and religious rhetoric in politics. They tend to find sincere religious sentiments so alien that anyone who is conversant with the language of faith sounds nutty to them. But like it or not, this is still a predominantly religious country, and lots of voters respond well to religious rhetoric of the non-angry variety. I personally find it every bit as off-putting as Matt does, but we’re in the minority.

It’s not such a weird blind spot when you think about it.  When religion seems to you to have little or no relevant or meaningful application to public life, you almost have to assume that anyone employing such rhetoric or actually pursuing policies on account of religious teachings is either totally cynical or a crazed theocrat (or perhaps, in the view of some secular observers, both at the same time).  The idea that religious politics need not be either utterly vacuous or profoundly threatening to society contradicts a raft of assumptions that secular people have about the intersection of religion and politics.  These people have also become so accustomed to the anodyne generic theism of our Presidents that it is jarring to them to hear someone cite Scripture with fluency and some modicum of understanding.

Ross says of the possible Romney combeack:

If he seems viable, he’ll have Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, and the rest of talk radio in his corner.

This is mostly right, with one notable exception.  For some reason, Michael Medved has been going out of his way to take Huckabee’s side over the past few months, and he was an early proponent of the idea that Huckabee could unify the party better than others.  In the wake of Ames, many people saw Huckabee’s second place finish as a kind of amusing curiosity, but Medved managed to see something early on that the rest of us ignored. 

Five months ago, Medved saw something different about Huckabee:

First, his distinctly blue-collar, proudly working class background will help to destroy the notion that Republicans are the party of Wall Street and the country club.

But the Republicans, at least at the level of leadership and policymaking, really are that party, and what they seem to fear is that Huckabee will not just destroy this perception but also threaten to change the priorities of the party in ways disadvantageous to “Wall Street and the country club” (i.e., corporate interests).  The more I think about it, the more wrong I think they are about Huckabee, which makes his “populism” just so much sympathising with American workers while doing nothing at all for them.  Call it Potemkin Sam’s Club Republicanism. 

Medved saw Huckabee’s background as an electoral asset:

The old Democratic class warfare tactics simply won’t work against Huckabee—his personal style and background make it impossible to associate him with some privileged elite. 

Yet to listen to The Wall Street Journal, you’d think that Huckabee was using class warfare tactics.  The problem that the GOP higher-ups seem to be having with the man is that he isn’t associated with their privileged elite, at least not directly.  What makes Huckabee a valuable general election candidate are the very things that make him hateful to large parts of the GOP and movement leadership, but these general election assets are the things that ought to recommend him to them.

More remarkably, Medved saw Huckabee as the perfect candidate to shore up the right against a disaffected protest candidate:

With a Huckabee candidacy, on the other hand, a self-righteous anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-globalism fringe campaign becomes less powerful (and less necessary, for that matter). Those who worry that international conspirators are subverting American sovereignty as part of some CFR or Neo-Con conspiracy will feel far less fearful of Huckabee than of any other major candidate.

So the candidate who has praised NAFTA, called opponents of his pro-immigration bills racists and un-Christian, and claims to take foreign policy cues from Richard Haass and Frank Gaffney (when he isn’t declaring his love for Charles Krauthammer) is the one who will tamp down an anti-immigration and anti-globalist third party candidate who dislikes the influence of the CFR and neocons?  If I had read this before the anti-Huckabee reaction, I would have laughed (it’s still pretty bizarre), but when I see Huckabee embracing Gilchrist and a hard anti-amnesty line and when I see him being painted as some protectionist proponent of national autarchy this statement is no longer quite so bizarre. 

One thing that Medved didn’t foresee was the tremendous backlash against the candidate that was coming:

And it’s tough for anyone, from any faction in the party, to feel mad at Mike Huckabee. 

David Brooks made a similar claim later, at which I duly scoffed, but there had to be some reason why both of them saw Huckabee as a unifying figure in the GOP where everyone else saw a radioactive, coalition-destroying candidate.  As it turns out, both of them were simply wrong about the Republican reaction to Huckabee, but what is more difficult is trying to understand why the reaction is as ferocious as it has been.  I’ve floated the “Huckabee is the social conservatives’ revenge” idea, as well as the “economic populist” angle and the “he embarrassingly reminds the GOP of the Bush administration that they have propped up” view, and more recently suggested that Huckabee is just too Southern and low-class for the GOP establishment to accept, and there is something to all of these explanations.  But any one by itself or all of them together still fail to explain fully the hostility. 

Medved also had this amusing prediction:

The big negatives the press will no doubt begin to attach to the surging Huckabee campaign involve the notion that he’s just too religious (and doesn’t believe in undirected, random Darwinism) and that he’s got no experience in foreign policy. 

Yet the main parts of “the press” making these sorts of arguments are conservative outlets and pundits.  It is Republican leaders who are extremely worried about his alleged excessive religiosity, his creationism and his lack of foreign policy experience.  For their own reasons, mainstream media outlets continue mostly to lavish praise on Huckabee.  Yes, they have begun digging into his ethics record and decisions as governor, but by and large it is not the mainstream media that want to annihilate him (at least not yet)–that is one of the conservative media’s obsessions at present. 

As I’ve said before, I know the reasons why I, as a paleo, don’t like Huckabee and wouldn’t want him as President, but these are all the reasons why Bush voters should like him.  If you liked NCLB, you’ll love a candidate who receives the endorsement of the New Hampshire NEA.  The common complaint against Huckabee is that he isn’t really conservative, or not conservative enough, and I would agree that he isn’t by my standards, but by this standard now being applied to Huckabee Bush should never have passed muster, either.  The self-exculpatory explanation from conservatives who supported Bush in both elections was that they either “always” knew that Bush wasn’t really conservative but were being pragmatic (lesser of two evils, yadda yadda yadda) or they realised too late that Bush wasn’t really governing as a conservative.  The new story about Huckabee is that he is so un-conservative that he isn’t even as conservative as Bush, whom they now reject as non-conservative.  What seems to be troubling these establishment critics of Huckabee is that he is no less conservative than Bush, and may be more so in some respects, but all of a sudden they have discovered a deep wellspring of uncompromising principle that does not allow them to tolerate Huckabee, even as they have cheered on Bush for seven years.  This is an almost Romneyesque discovery of first principles in its novelty, and it is a bit hard to take seriously if you have been opposed to Bush from the beginning.