Yglesias captures the frustration with Hagel quite well:

But of course he is a Senator from Nebraska, and instead of finding myself admiring his work in that capacity I find myself thinking that Hagel would make a damn good “reasonable conservative” blogger.

In the past, I have been pretty relentless and unforgiving in my criticism of Hagel’s relative inaction.  Certainly, for the first three years of the war he was far too complacent.  But I think that both Hagel’s boosters and his critics, including myself, have invested the man with much more power and influence than he really has as a Senator.  Granted, he could have probably done more than he has, and he could have at least stayed for one more term, and he could have followed through on his criticisms of the plan to invade Iraq and voted against the authorisation resolution, but even if he were doing more than he is doing there is painfully little that he can do so long as the Senate Republican caucus remains wedded to the perpetuation of the war and the general deformation of U.S. foreign policy.  On most things pertaining to Iraq, Hagel has voted with the Democratic majority, and he has publicly said fairly intelligent things about negotiating with Iran.  If the Democratic majority in the Senate has been unable to move antiwar legislation, the blame cannot be laid at Hagel’s door.  Calling on him to run for President, as many did, was always bound to end in disappointment one way or another.  If he did run as an independent, he would get little traction with Republicans disaffected over the war, because he has never been unambiguously against the war despite having foreseen so many of the calamities that have happened, and he has voted with the White House so often in the last several years that he could not credibly represent an alternatve to Bushism as a whole, much less be a “more credible version” of Ron Paul. 

Yglesias refers to Hagel’s missed opportunity “to offer the country a more credible version of Ron Paul’s efforts to break the Bushist orthodoxy,” but on so many of the things that conservatives and independents find offensive about “Bushist orthodoxy” Hagel has generally been right alongside the President.  Opponents of Bush shower Hagel with praise because he, too, is an opponent of the President in a few very select areas–this is unfortunately a mirror image of the way that Republicans shower Lieberman with praise because he agrees with them in a few very select areas.  There are worse things to be than the anti-Lieberman, but this is not the basis for a “more credible version” of an effort to break Bushism.

Hagel is a “more credible” anti-Bush than Paul in the way that establishment figures dub various experts or politicians “serious” more or less arbitrarily: Hagel is “more credible” as an anti-Bush figure, but he is, in fact, very rarely anti-Bush and very rarely anti-Bushist.  If we measure credibility in this way, Michael O’Hanlon is a “more credible” antiwar voice than people who actually oppose the war and Rudy Giuliani is a “more credible” opponent of abortion than the pro-life candidates.  That is, someone is dubbed credible when he is actually quite content with the status quo in most respects and is sufficiently unthreatening that he is considered the acceptable face of opposition or criticism.

Mr. Thompson’s performance at the debate capped a weeklong period in which he held only one retail campaign event: a “meet Fred” rally last Saturday in a small room at the back of Sticky Fingers, a barbecue restaurant in Summerville, S.C. There was no music or food. There were not even chairs, and so some 100 voters there to see him had to stand for three hours before he arrived.

After brief remarks in which he cited the broad conservative principles that he said guided him, he took just a half-dozen questions. The appearance lasted less than 30 minutes, and he left without mingling with customers elsewhere in the restaurant. ~The New York Times

Perhaps this is a calculated gambit on the part of the Thompson campaign.  After all, the more people see of Fred, the less interested they become.  It follows that you should hide the candidate from as many voters as possible, and when you expose him to a few you should make it extremely brief and uninformative.  Perhaps the plan is to keep the voters hungry–literally and figuratively (which explains the lack of food at campaign events).  Fred was never so popular as when he was not officially running, so maybe he is passively trying to reclaim those magic moments of summer when he wasn’t campaigning at all, but was widely beloved by an electorate completely ignorant of who he was.  I think he hopes that his poll numbers will soar as his actual campaigning time approaches zero.  Soon enough, in another bold move, he will eventually drop out of the race in a cunning attempt to win the nomination by unanimous acclamation.

Ross worries because his McCain-Huckabee speculation has been adopted by Broder, but it is not the idea itself that is necessarily terrible–it is the classic Broderian way in which Broder advances the proposal that guarantees that it becomes unspeakably bad (rather like his previous applause for Bloomberg-Hagel).  The theme of the column is supposed to be principles.  The idea is that McCain and Huckabee have principles, Romney and Giuliani don’t (he may have a point there), and the rest of the field doesn’t matter.   Better than that, you see, they have “clarity, character and, yes, simple humanity.”  This is just another version of Broder’s endless praise for politicians who oppose their own party’s voters on major policy issues, and who do so in such a way that they agree with David Broder and thus prove themselves members of what I’m sure he thinks is the “reasonable center” of politics.  What is Broder really getting at?  Well, he makes it clear soon enough: McCain and Huckabee have bucked the opposition to illegal immigration in their party and don’t take their “rhetorical cues” from Tancredo.  That is apparently the main thing that matters in making them worthy nominees. 

Ross’ original, brief proposal was much more interesting.  Ross was making a case for the viability of such a ticket in the general election, and there is something to this.  In theory, they should be able to hold down the social conservative base of the party, satisfy war supporters and offer themselves up as two men with extensive experience in government.  They might bring in 45-46% of the vote that way, which could be the best the GOP can hope for this cycle.  (In a typically lower turnout election last year, Republicans saw their share of the popular vote drop by five points from ’04 and ’02, which is especially remarkable for a midterm vote and suggests continued weakness in next year’s election when there will be much higher Democratic turnout than last year.)  I think their immigration view will still be a millstone around their necks, and not just among Republican voters.  If illegal immigration really was as much of an issue in MA-05 this fall as I and some others believe it was, a candidate who supported border security and interior enforcement without amnesty provisions might be slightly more competitive in more parts of the country than supposedy more “moderate” and “centrist” Republicans such as McCain and Huckabee.  (As Ogonowski’s defeat and the results of the Virginia elections show, this issue isn’t enough on its own to propel the GOP to victory, but those who calculate that it actually hurts the GOP electorally are mistaken.)  There was tremendous opposition to “comprehensive” immigration legislation from virtually all quarters, and it isn’t clear that the GOP wins back independents and “Perot voters” and the like by putting forward some of their most liberal, pro-immigration members as nominees.  In any case, I think Ross and everyone else understands that it is exactly Huckabee and McCain’s immigration views that will continue to hold them back in the primaries.  Why else would Broder say that the GOP would have to “grit its teeth” to nominate them, except that they are profoundly unrepresentative of what a large part of the party believes on immigration?  The strange thing is that immigration is probably one of the few issues where the GOP is much closer to the views of the majority of the country, and it is one of the few on which it is still trusted more than the Democrats, so the last candidates you would want to nominate are those who are known for their sharp disagreements with the rest of the party on this very question.   

Then again, as long as the war remains as unpopular as it is, any Republican nominee dedicated to staying in Iraq will drag the party down, which makes discussions of GOP competitiveness in the general election somewhat moot.  Bearing all that in mind, this idea might have some potential*.  Even so, we can be pretty sure it isn’t going to happen, and not just because of immigration.  According to this, McCain’s opposition to torture apparently also scores poorly with at least one GOP focus group, so if Huckabee is accepting at least part of McCain’s position on torture he may become almost as unpopular in the party as McCain in the end. 

*I am speaking here purely in terms of electoral calculation.  I can think of few things more terrifying from a policy perspective than the prospect of another administration that marries aggressive hegemonic foreign policy with saccharine moralising pseudo-piety and policies that encourage mass immigration.

P.S.  Much of what I said above can also be said about a Giuliani-Huckabee combination, which is slightly less implausible politically given the current polls, but it is even less likely to prevail in the general election.

Someone had mentioned the following in a recent conversation, so I tracked down a source for it:

Huckabee is described by one national conservative leader as a member of the “Christian left.”

This reminded me that the very next day after Novak related this piece of information, Gerson wrote his column praising Huckabee.  The description of Huckabee as a member of the Christian left and the critique of Gerson as essentially being a left-evangelical who happens to be Republican fit together very well.  The connection between Gerson’s center-left, weepy “heroic conservatism” and Huckabee’s saccharine, “kill them but cry about it” (to use Michael’s celebrated phrase) mentality was clear even before Gerson’s column, and it probably became even more clear in recent weeks and especially after this week’s debate.  The description of Huckabee as being on the Christian left also reminded me of two goodreviews of Gerson’s Heroic Conservatism.  Now I haven’t read the book, but I have read and heard enough of Gerson’s work (as well as interviews he has given) to get a sense of what he thinks this “heroic conservatism” (which James has brilliantly renamedhelpy heroism) is supposed to mean. 

First, let’s go back and see what TAC‘s Kara Hopkins had to say about Gerson and the book in the latest issue:

He’s also an unlikely conservative: his earliest political experience was representing Jimmy Carter in a high school debate, and, when asked by the New Yorker to name his favorite president, he praised FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Wilson before mentioning Reagan—“to some extent.”

This fits with the picture of Gerson Matthew Scully gave in his takedown article for The Atlantic, in which Scully described how Gerson routinely looked to old FDR and Kennedy speeches for inspiration in writing war and foreign policy speeches for Bush:

Some moments seem ludicrous only in retrospect, as when we wrote the speech that Bush would give on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, on May 1, 2003—remembered now for the “Mission Accomplished” banner. As usual, Mike had come in with a grand, historic vision for the effort—along with a literary antecedent to imitate. This was another habit of his, and with each speech you could always predict which models he would turn to. When it was a speech on race, in would come Mike with a sheaf of heavily underlined Martin Luther King Jr. speeches. For speeches on poverty, it was time for more compassionate-conservative fervor, drawn secondhand from the addresses of Robert F. Kennedy. For updates on the war against terrorism, we could expect to see Mike’s well-worn copies of JFK and FDR speeches plopped on the table for instruction, and for imitation that when unchecked (as in the second inaugural) could slip perilously close to copying.

Kara continues:

But that is what heroic conservatism is about: moral fervor meets global ambition. Perhaps the former senses its prickliness—its tendency to joyless parochialism—and longs to widen its confines. The latter may perceive instability in its enthusiasm and want a tether. Together they make a potent pair—and a dangerous one.

It certainly is dangerous, and perhaps nowhere more so than in its capacity to dress up injustice as the height of morality.  One reason for this moral confusion is that Gerson has adopted utopian ideals, which invariably excuse and accept excesses in the name of greater goods:

But then he takes a decidedly radical turn, for the “moral ideals” Gerson has in mind—“liberty, tolerance, and equality”—echo the Jacobins’ own, and our pact appears to be with every inhabitant of the planet. “Our nation cherishes freedom, but we do not own it,” he wrote in a text Bush delivered from the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan. “While it is the birthright of every American, it is also the equal promise of the religious believer in Southern Sudan, or an Iraqi farmer in the Tigris Valley, or of a child born in China today.”

Thus the villains in Gerson’s morality play aren’t liberals, for whom government programs are only improved by global scope, but realists. He condemns them for “offer[ing] no millennial goal to pursue in foreign policy—neither international order, nor democratic peace.” But he sees their stock falling. With the zeal of a man who has found his moment, he exults, “After the shock of 9/11, the Republican Party—the party of realism and caution—had become the party of idealism, action, and risk.”

Those wild tendencies allowed the war on terror its global reach, but it was Gerson’s brush that simultaneously made it a study in black and white. The worst of worlds combined. Where the exercise of force should have been constrained, we got a crusade, unchecked by just-war dictates or historical implausibility. And where the shadowland of conflicting interests and ancient grievance should have been afforded wide estate, we drew rigid dichotomy instead.

Obviously, it is a very odd sort of conservative who seeks any millennial goals whatever, whether in foreign policy or elsewhere, and in fact this is proof of a lack of conservatism.  It is typical of Gerson’s worldview that his criticisms of others are actually the highest compliments they could receive: realists can take some consolation that they disappoint the fantastical ambition of Michael Gerson, since no one should want to satisfy him.  God shall usher in the millennium at a time when He wills.  It is our task to preserve what has been entrusted to us until the Kingdom comes, and efforts to hasten its coming or establish it here below are as impious as they are bound to fail.   

Ross is more sympathetic to some of what Gerson proposes (and is therefore that much more devastating in rejecting Gerson’s prescriptions):

Particularly since Gerson’s central argument is basically correct: American conservatism needs to stand for something besides government-cutting if it hopes to regain the majority that George W. Bush won (and quickly lost).

Perhaps that is right.  As a matter of electoral politics, it is hard to disagree with this, though I wonder whether American conservatism should trouble itself quite so much with winning Republican majorities.  It seems to me that part of the woes of the current conservative movement stem from spending rather too much time worrying about that majority and not enough considering the most wise and prudent courses of action to pursue.  That’s a debate for another day.   Nonetheless, it seems clear that regaining the  Republican majority will not come about by embracing the ideas that helped to lose it. 

Ross adds:

If Gerson’s diagnosis is largely correct, however, his proposed remedy—the “heroic conservatism” of the title—seems more likely to kill the patient than to save it. Standing amid the rubble of an administration that promised (often in his own flowery prose) far more than it delivered, Gerson summons the GOP to a still-more-ambitious set of foreign and domestic crusades. For a “heroic conservative,” transforming the Middle East is only the beginning: In place of the cramped anti-government vision of a Dick Armey or a Phil Gramm, a Gersonized GOP would set the federal government to work lifting up all the wretched of the earth, whether they’re death-penalty defendants and teenage runaways at home or Darfuri refugees and Chinese dissidents abroad.

I would part with Ross, not surprisingly, in the description of the anti-government, or more accurately smaller government, vision as “cramped,” since there is nothing more narrow, dogmatic and limited than the fanatical idea that the problems of the entire world are ours to solve through the efforts of the U.S. government.  The goals of small government conservatives are necessarily limited, as they believe government must be, but their vision is, in fact, an expansive and broad one that seeks to allow the widest latitudes of a free society.  It is the Gersons and Huckabees who are constantly hectoring us to save the world and lose weight at the same time, all the while either pouting (Gerson) or smiling in blatant attempts to manipulate us emotionally into accepting their misguided policy proposals.  Gerson appropriates the word heroic for his program, but ignores that heroism is the province of individual heroes, rather than the result of collective efforts or the product of state programs. 

Huckabee is the closest thing to Gerson’s ideal candidate in this race, which we really have to hope means that Huckabee is doomed to fail.  He is someone who provides the “bleeding-heart conservative” alternative combined with an openness to the expansion of government (rhetoric about the Fair Tax notwithstanding), a steady dose of moralising in support of questionable policies on immigration and no particularly strong opposition to intervention overseas.  He lacks Brownback’s record of “compassionate conservatism” abroad, but he gives every indication that he would be more than glad to pursue a Brownbackian agenda in foreign policy.  Should he prevail, and should Gersonism receive a new lease on life in the GOP, we should understand at that point that, in some real sense, the GOP will have been taken over by the Christian Left. 

Take notes, Obama: Condi Rice dug deep into her bag of tricks and…recycled her “childhood in Birmingham as source of foreign policy insight” argument that she has used far too many timesalready:

Rice began by saying she did not want to draw historical parallels or be too self-reflective [bold mine-DL], but as a young girl she grew up in Birmingham, Ala., “at a time of separation and tension.”

She noted that a local church was bombed by white separatists, killing four girls, including a classmate of hers.

“Like the Israelis, I know what it is like to go to sleep at night, not knowing if you will be bombed, of being afraid to be in your own neighborhood, of being afraid to go to your church,” she said.

But, she added, as a black child in the South, being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants, she also understood the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians.

“I know what it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian,” she said. “I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness.”  

“There is pain on both sides,” Rice concluded. “This has gone on too long.”

She knows what it is like to hear that you “can’t go through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian”?  Did she have trouble making it through checkpoints on the interstate?  What is she talking about?  She says she doesn’t want to “draw historical parallels or be too self-reflective” right before she draws historical parallels and reflects on her own childhood as a window onto the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.  Does this mean, despite her insistence that she wasn’t drawing historical parallels, that she was making a comparison between segregation and the treatment of the Palestinians?  Was she (gasp!) implying that there is some kind of apartheid system over there?

Michael Moynihan’s article, framing Chavez’s power-grab and the upcoming Russian elections as evidence of “the Cold War’s return,” wouldn’t merit much comment, except that he makes this claim as he tries to tell his audience why they should care about what happens in the domestic politics of other countries:

Despite their obvious contempt for democratic institutions, both leaders still command a disturbing, though hardly overwhelming, level of Western support; defenders who will doubtless welcome a Chavez or Putin electoral victory and retrenchment.

He cites John Laughland’s TAC article on Putin (not available online) and a couple HuffPo columnists.  I’ll leave the latter until another time or perhaps to someone else, because the columns are available online and can be judged for themselves.  Moynihan attributes to Laughland “support” for Putin that would make him “welcome” electoral victory and retrenchment for United Russia, when Laughland’s article is an attempt to provide some balance and perspective about Putin’s regime, about which there have been more than a few breathless and hysterical Reason articles in the past.  There was no question of welcoming or dreading United Russia’s victory, since every informed person knows it is certain to happen and is a fact that should be viewed with some dispassion.  For some people, attempting to understand foreign governments and leaders in a sober way–free of provocative references to the start of another Cold War–is evidence of endorsement and support and “defense” of a foreign government.  To the extent that these observers want to avoid hostility and conflict between the West and these other governments, they will try to get past the (frequently self-serving) propaganda that would seek to make every insufficiently (or, in the case of Russia and Venezuela, arguably excessively) democratic government around the world into a dire threat or villains to be opposed. 

We should be clear about a few things.  No one needs to applaud Putin’s authoritarian populism (and no one is applauding it) to understand why it prevails in Russia and will continue to do so, no matter how many hectoring Western articles are writtenn against it, and that it is part of the political reality of our time.  We can respond to it rationally and according to our interests, which dictate that we do not get into another escalating confrontation with Russia, or we can respond to it viscerally and stoke such fruitless confrontation by making the internal politics of Russia our business. 

Since Laughland’s article isn’t online, it is difficult for non-subscribers to check Moynihan’s claim that it offers support and defense of Putin.  It seeks to get past caricature and vilification, yes, but the article is generally descriptive, not apologetic.  It allows Putin to speak for himself, rather than having Western pundits impute motives to him based on their own preoccupations with curtailing Russian power and backing U.S. hegemony in Eurasia.  If I were someone preoccupied with vilifying a foreign government, I might also find this “disturbing,” since it interferes with the generally unified message from Western media that we must fear and loathe Russia under Putin.   

Laughland starts by noting the excessive demonisation that seems to be focused on certain Slavic nations (typically when their governments do not play ball with Washington):

Is there such a thing as Slavophobia?  To be sure, not all Slavic nations are vilified in the West, but the recent demonization of the Serbs and Russians has an especially vicious quality….the Western mind attributes to them the most sinister of motives, as  if they were the embodiment of evil itself.

He then describes a meeting he had with Putin, noting:

The contrast between the image of Putin in the West and Putin in the flesh could hardly be greater.

This would almost have to be true, since the image promoted by many Western pundits is that of Stalin risen from the grave. 

Laughland says later:

Lack of ideology is the new Russian ideology, and Putin has a lot to be non-ideological about.  In his eight years in power, Russia has gone from being a semi-bankrupt state to having the largest gold reserves in the world and some $300 billion in foreign currency reserves besides….The Putin boom cannot be reduced to oil and gas revenues alone, for it has lifted many sectors and many different regions of this, the largest country in the world….Putin specifically referred to the abandonment of ideology during his long talk with us [bold mine-DL].  Asked what Russia’s role should now be in the world, he replied that neither the Tsarist model of support for Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire nor the Soviet model of support for socialism were remotely appropriate for Russia today.  Lenin, he said, had cared nothing for Russia itself but only for world revolution.  Putin spoke firmly to as he told us, “I have no wish to see our people, and even less our leadership, seized by missionary ideas.  We need to be a country that in every way has a healthy self-respect and can stand up for its interests but a country that is at the same time able to reach agreements and be a convenient partner for all members of the international community.”  Putin sees it as his mission to make Russia a normal country.

Again, this is not “lauding”–it is describing what has happened and quoting what Putin says.  Now you can be skeptical, and we should always be skeptical when politicians say any of these things, but the point of Laughland’s article is to report what Putin said at this meeting, to try to understand the current Russian government as one that is not nearly so far removed from modern Europe as its critics would make it out to be and to appeal to people in the West to be more reasonable in their attitudes towards the Russian government.  As both Moynihan and Laughland would acknowledge, the current form of regime in Russia is not going anywhere anytime soon.  It is realism and common sense to see Putin and Russia as something other than “villainous” (Moynihan’s word for Putin) enemies to be thwarted and checked.  Putin and Putinism will remain, so it is probably wiser to seek a modus vivendi rather than endlessly provoking and perturbing Moscow.  If that constitutes a “defense” of Putin, we have watered down the meaning of apologetics pretty thoroughly. 

For the record, I don’t approve of Putin’s squelching of independent media and most of his so-called “managed democracy,” and I don’t approve of Saakashvili and Musharraf’s declarations of emergency rule and everything that goes with them, but what ought to matter most in determining our relations with all these states are our interests and theirs and the points of agreement between them.  Where Putin’s rule has been promoting stability in Russia, Saakashvili and Musharraf have promoted instability and have in the process jeopardised real U.S. interests in their respective regions.  It seems to me that Americans should be a great deal more concerned with what our feckless client states are doing that may harm U.S. interests, and we should be much less concerned with what a very powerful potential ally does within its own borders.  Most pundits and politicians in America seem to have this exactly backwards.

Jim Antle notes that Ron Paul’s campaign has raised over $10 million this quarter. The campaign could reach its goal of $12 million before the next fundraising day, which had been announced as December 16 in commemoration of the Boston Tea Party.

To hear the pronouncements about Ukraine that issue from that establishment’s nodes every time the country makes it through another election without mass violence, you’d think this was Switzerland. Brussels and Washington pat Ukraine on the head for its ‘maturity’ and its ‘evolving democracy’. The smart locals know they live in a klepto-oligarchy, and that the West will trumpet Ukraine’s ‘robust democratic culture’ as long as capital keeps flowing in and out of the country. It’s meaningful that every time populist Ukrainian politicians have made noises about renationalising industrial properties stolen by oligarchs, the screaming from the West has been such to make you think a return to Stalinist terror had been proposed.

And it’s telling to watch Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, the Orange revolution’s villain restored now to power, smiling a thousand-watt smile as he consorts with sheepish Western leaders. He knows where his bread gets buttered. Ukraine has achieved that sine qua non of the second-tier country whose elite wants to prosper in the global order — it’s managed to unlink politics from the economy. ~Andrey Slivka

Ross wrote:

Without the two of them [Huckabee and Paul], you’d have a field whose ideological spectrum runs from Steven Moore to Grover Norquist on domestic policy, and from Michael Ledeen to Norman Podhoretz on foreign affairs. There would be greater party unity, sure, but sometimes unity’s just another word for self-marginalization. I don’t think Huckabee and Paul are the ideal candidates to jolt the GOP out of its ideological rut, but they’re better than nothing.

I agree entirely with the sentiment here, and I have made a similar point before:

I don’t like Huckabee, and I don’t want him to do well, but both he and Paul drive different parts of the establishment crazy and could throw the entire race into disarray, which would be a good thing for many reasons.

But I think Ross is being a little hard on the Republicans.  They are a “big tent” party, after all.  Their ideological spectrum on foreign affairs easily runs all the way from Victor Davis Hanson to Michael Rubin.  The breadth is truly remarkable.

Will Huckabee and Paul actually jolt the party out of its rut?  Certainly, you can say that it’s far too early to know for sure.  Even so, aside from their sowing of some electoral chaos in the early states and giving mainstream pundits conniption fits, which is all fine by me, what are the odds that the establishment will take the growing success of these candidacies as evidence that the establishment needs to change and adjust to address the constituencies these candidates represent?  What will stop the party establishment from giving both the third degree in the conservative media (treatment that has only just begun for Huckabee), squash their perceived ‘heresies’ on economics, trade and foreign policy and carry on as if nothing had happened?  One major repudiation at the polls hasn’t managed to snap them out of it, so what does the GOP actually learn from Huckabee and Paul?  They learn to exclude candidates like them from the debates early on.  The party will not try to co-opt Huckabee’s protectionism or Paul’s non-interventionism, because as far as the party leadership is concerned these positions are completely unacceptable.  However, all of this may credit Huckabee with more envelope-pushing than he deserves.  Instead of jolting the party out of a rut, most of his campaign seems to be aimed at easing the GOP back into the sinkhole of Bushism from which some are desperately trying to escape. 

In many respects, Huckabee’s policy ideas–to the extent that they are actually ideas and not just sentimental gestures–are “compassionate conservatism”/Gersonism risen from the dead (try as we might, we seem unable to kill this flesh-eating zombie of an ideology).  Did I mention that I don’t like Huckabee?  The extent to which Huckabee succeeds will measure how captivated the GOP rank and file are by the strange lure of Bush Era “conservatism” that Ross described here.  Ross’ thesis back at the start of the year was this:

Since the Republicans’ stinging defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, Bush’s distinctive ideological cocktail—social conservatism and an accommodation with big government at home, and a moralistic interventionism abroad—has similarly been derided by many as political poison. The various ingredients of “Bushism,” it’s been argued, have alienated fiscal hawks and foreign-policy realists, Catholics and libertarians—in short, everyone but the party’s evangelical base.

But someone must have forgotten to tell the GOP presidential field. If you consider how the nation’s most ambitious Republicans are positioning themselves for 2008, Bushism looks like it could have surprising staying power.

The rise of Huckabee to date is strong evidence that Ross was right that the poisonous cocktail of Bushism(-Gersonism) may well be here to stay, at least in the near term.  Paul’s insurgent campaign offers the small hope that there is some resistance to this tendency within the GOP.