As I said when I reviewed his book, I think Sullivan’s entire theory about the GOP as a “religious party” dominated by “fundamentalists” gets things badly wrong.  The “theocon consensus” to which Sullivan refers is one against which the party and movement establishment has been violently protesting for the last year, and one that prominent figures in the movement consigned effectively to the margins over ten years ago when the actual “theocons” were perceived to be questioning the legitimacy of “the regime” over the issue of abortion.  Party and movement elites really don’t want religion to have much of a meaningful role, and not just in the selection of candidates.  They prefer to use it largely for symbolic appeals and GOTV efforts, and things have reached a point where Christian conservative voters may have had enough of empty gestures and manipulation.  The drive to marginalise social conservatives and blame them for the party’s defeat last year and the Giuliani candidacy both showed that a significant part of the Republican Party’s leadership was trying to become even less focused on religious and social issues than it had been.  These attempts are failing, but that they were made at all shows the priorities of the leadership of what is still a very secular party.  What exacerbates the cultural hostility to Huckabee is the association of his evangelical Christianity with a politics of what Reihan has sometimescalled the “lower-middle”–this makes Huckabee both culturally different and potentially somewhat opposed to the interests of corporations and leads him to favour trying to secure the economic interests of these voters.

Sullivan perceived galloping fundamentalism when religion was used mainly a stage prop by the GOP.  Now other secular conservatives are freaking out at the prospect of voters backing a religious conservative who seems to take religious conservatism seriously.  The general conservative rejection of Sullivan’s thesis was partly an acknowledgement that the GOP was very far from being anything like a “religious party.”  The current backlash against Huckabee is part of the effort to make sure that religious voters don’t upset the current arrangement, in which religious conservatives receive lip service and are supposed to accept gratefully whatever they are given.

While the attacks are on valid issues, at heart, the attacks appear to be because he is a former preacher from the South — a country bumpkin and a Jesus Freak. ~Erick Erickson

Via Ponnuru

Well, yes, that is a very large part of the reason for the GOP and conservative movement establishment’s reaction against Huckabee.  Additionally, their problem is that he is primarily a social conservative candidate in a party and in an election cycle where the social conservatives were supposed to sit down, be quiet and support the appropriate “national security” candidate.  People in the heartland were, as usual, supposed to accept whatever the coastal elites–in this case, conservative coastal elites–threw at them. 

There are two ways to express this frustration with Huckabee: to focus on his poor tax policy record and basically non-existent foreign policy credentials, or to belittle the college he attended and deplore his religiosity.  The latter approach has started to become more popular.  This is why many conservative pundits have focused their criticism on the “Christian leader” reference, his views on evolution and his alleged “insults” towards Mormonism.  Religion is all very well and good for some of these elites, provided that it doesn’t get taken too seriously and doesn’t become too central.  There are some in the conservative movement and the GOP who could in one breath defend evangelicals against the old insult that they are “easily led,” and who in the next will complain that those same evangelicals are not keeping in their place.   

Some of this reaction is tied together with some pundits’ support for a Huckabee rival, and some of it is tied to legitimate criticisms of Huckabee’s record, but I think a lot of it is cultural hostility of some Republican and conservative elites to the broad mass of evangelical Christians who make up a significant bloc of the GOP.  The latter are useful allies, but are otherwise treated as the unwanted stepchild that the elite would prefer to banish to the basement whenever possible.  Thompson was an acceptable Southerner, because he was a Southerner who had adapted to Washington and was a lobbyist and actor, and he was someone who rarely attended church, while Huckabee represents, for good and ill, a lot of Southern Republican voters.  Thompson was the sort of candidate who could, for some reason, get the base excited and appease the elite at the same time, except that he was, in practice, an awful candidate.  Huckabee has captured Thompson’s supporters, but cannot satisfy the elite. 

Combine some inherited distaste or unfamiliarity with the South among some pundits with the fear that the GOP is already too defined by its Southern wing and that it risks becoming a regional party (an overblown fear that once again tries to blame the GOP’s woes on cultural and social conservative politics of the Southerners), and you have a recipe for tremendous opposition to a Southern evangelical candidate.  It is absolutely true that the reaction against him by the establishment has been disproportionate, considering how ready so many conservative pundits have been to give Giuliani free passes and the benefit of the doubt in every case: “He has indicted friends with mob connections?  Why worry?  He’s pro-choice?  So what?  Don’t you know there’s a war on?!”  Huckabee’s rise was tolerable to these people so long as they could persuade themselves that it might help Giuliani capture the nomination, but now that he has become a more credible threat to Giuliani it has become open season.  Support for Giuliani’s rise had already shown social conservatives that they and their agenda were not very important to the party leadership, and the withering contempt for Huckabee simply confirmed that understanding. 

Erickson continues:

The New York-Washington Corridor of Conservative Intelligentsia^TM bristles at the idea that a back water social conservative from Arkansas has excited the base in a way the others haven’t. We were, after all, suppose to go for Romney or Rudy. They told us so.      

Huckabee’s creationism is one of the things that I suspect irritates conservative elites the most.  After all, how can they really accept someone who doesn’t accept evolution?  Acknowledging the theory of evolution here really serves, as Rod mentioned in a recent bloggingheads in a slightly different discussion about Huckabee’s views, as a “cultural marker” that shows that you are sufficiently urbane and sophisticated.  It is a mark of belonging to a certain set of the educated elite and a way of showing that you are not really one of those people who literally believe the Genesis account of creation.  (Now there are perfectly good and correct exegetical and theological arguments against reading Genesis this way, but that is not what we’re talking about.)  It is fine to humour those people with preposterous notions such as teaching Intelligent Design in science class (a position that has quasi-intellectual respectability), but letting them take prominent national leadership roles is really going too far.  If voters perceive supporting Huckabee’s candidacy as a way to stick a finger in the eye of the party leaders, I think they may be just angry and disaffected enough to do it.  As I said earlier today, the hostility of East Coast pundits may translate into an advantage for Huckabee’s popularity.

Update: John McIntyre has the elite anti-Huckabee roundup.

Ross coins the term Huckenfreude:

Pleasure derived from the outrage of prominent conservative pundits over the rising poll numbers of Mike Huckabee.

There are moments when I feel this, but it is balanced by an equally powerful feeling of Huckenschreck, the gnawing horror that Mike Huckabee might just be nominated and have an outside shot at acquiring immense power.  As a wrecking ball who smashes the rest of the field and drives the establishment into fits of insanity, Huckabee is great.  As a candidate for President, he is just about as awful as the people he is tearing down.  If he could just clear the field of its more objectionable members and then go away, that would be ideal.

Huckabee. It sounds like one of those American restaurant chains popular across the South, the kind of place where on All You Can Eat Tuesdays the patrons down buckets of barbecued ribs and fried chicken while sucking on 32-ounce tumblers of diet soda. ~Gerard Baker

The chain restaurant meme continues, but from this sentence it is clear that Gerard Baker has never actually been to these chain restaurants.  There is also something strange about the association of Huckabee, weight-loss fanatic, with restaurants that are renowned for serving people excessive portions.  If this meme gets around, I can see it aiding Huckabee in small but important ways.  If most Republicans are suburban voters, and since these restaurants cover the suburbs like locusts during a blight, linking Huckabee in their minds with these restaurants would make him just a bit more attractive to them.  Plus, as weight-loss guru, he represents the kind of popular therapeutic self-help culture (which is in turn fueled by the overindulgence that the chain restaurants represent) that Michael long ago feared might make him popular:

I don’t want a President whose primary qualification seems to be the self-mastery of weight loss, spurred by diabetes.  I fear also that this is exactly what the American people do want. 
   

I have never given Fred Thompson much of a break this year, and from the beginning I thought the enthusiasm for him was an irrational outburst, a kind of mania that revealed despair among Republicans.  Simply put, it never made any sense.  But if I had to choose among all the non-Paul Republicans in contention right now, I would probably still have to say that Thompson was preferable to the rest.  What a pity, then, that the recent commentary praising his debate performance while saying that the debate is proof that he may not be finished yet is just not correct.  It really is over.  He just hasn’t acknowledged it.

Hotline/Diageo’s December survey has Thompson in fourth place in Iowa behind Giuliani, who isn’t even really campaigning there (a critic would say that Thompson isn’t really campaigning, either), and he has a fav/unfav of 37/42.  As a second choice, he still trails in fourth.  This is not the beginning of a comeback. 

Question 29 is also revealing about Huckabee’s advantage in Iowa: “Which of the following people, if any, do you think best represents strong moral and religious conviction?”  Huckabee receives 50%, Romney 24, and everyone else is in single digits.  The survey was taken between Dec. 7 and 12, so these are post-speech results. 

P.S.  Some small consolation for Thompson is that Research 2000’s Iowa poll has him tied for third with Giuliani at 9%.

With Rich Lowry’s scathing “Huckacide” column in National Review today and two Huck-bashing pieces in the Post, doesn’t it feel like the backlash against Huckabee has reached a critical saturation point? Does this start to show up in the polls? ~Eve Fairbanks

I think not.  It’s a fair question to ask, but I think it overestimates the power of conservative pundits, especially those who, like Krauthammer and Gerson, are not exactly speaking the language that current Huckabee supporters will understand or accept.  It also misses one of the reasons why Huckabee is doing so well.  He is most definitely not the establishment’s preferred candidate, and he is making the establishment go crazy.  Many of the criticisms against him are completely sound, but when his flaws are compared to the flaws of his rivals you begin to see that the establishment hostility to Huckabee is disproportionately great.  This image of Huckabee as the populist and the anti-Washington candidate, which he is cultivating assiduously, is one that I think is helping him tremendously, so every Washington and New York-based pundit who attacks him is contributing to that image.  (Incidentally, if Obama were in any danger of radically changing anything in Washington, I think you would see a much more concerted backlash against his candidacy.)  Huckabee’s support may start to weaken as his lack of organisation and money bring him back to earth, but I don’t think it will be because the pundits have rejected him.

Public political discussion of Governor Romney’s faith in recent weeks, however, has been marked by so many flagrant misstatements about that faith, and the repeitition of so many long-conventional bigotries about it, that it seemed to me to far beyond the limits of fair discussion. ~Michael Novak

So many flagrant misstatements?  Which misstatements are these?  Even if this is were tue, Novak’s point here seems to be that a little-understood religion is not well understood and open to mischaracterisation, so it is high time that we stop talking about it.  I confess that I don’t understand the complaints about unfairness at all.  Is it unfair to state publicly what a religion teaches?  If it is indeed the case that someone in this debate has erred and misrepresented LDS teachings, it seems to me that it is all the more important for those who see these statements as misrepresentations to step in and correct the record.  In the course of any other discussion, that is what would happen.  The natural response is not, “Everyone is being unfair to this presidential candidate, so I will endorse him.”  By the same token, I should endorse Obama if I think that it isunfairthat people spread the falsehood that he is a Muslim.  This is, to put it mildly, a strange approach to political endorsement.

Via Noah, Rasmussen reports its latest Florida poll in which Giuliani trails Huckabee and Romney.

And, besides, the thinking goes, people far from the border really don’t care. ~Peter Brown

Brown’s article makes a lot of sense, but I think it overlooks that the crucial thing that is driving the new wave of opposition to immigration is the response from voters in both border states and in states that are far in the interior.  If anyone does still think that people in interior states don’t care about immigration, this is incorrect. 

Open borders advocates often cite polling on immigration from border states as evidence that the issue is a losing one, which ignores intensity of the opponents who live in these border  states.  Meanwhile, the farther away from the border one is, the more troubling a broader mass of voters tends to find illegal immigration to be, especially as it begins to affect their communities.  I think this is because it strikes them as evidence of just how out of control things have become.  Obviously, Iowa is pretty far away from the Rio Grande, but immigration is a burning issue there, and not just among the activists.  The same was true for western Massachusetts and even among some Democratic voters, as the special election earlier this year showed.  Part of this, as Lizza’s story on immigration politics explains, is the reaction to recently arrived immigrants in places where there had not been large numbers of them before.  The shock of sudden change combined with the underlying dissatisfaction with government failures in this area of policy make for a fearsome political reaction.  Add to that the long-standing unhappiness of a significant number of very intense opponents in the border states.  As a result, enforcement and restrictionism become much more attractive throughout the country.