The November Chronicleslooks excellent, as usual.  There are several good articles on conservation by Dr. Landess, Tobias Lanz and Gregory McNamee.  Mark Shea has a fine piece on the miraculous and the materialist dogmatism of Matthew Parris.  There is much more besides that, and I do also happen to have a book review of Colin Well’s Sailing from Byzantium in the same issue.

Ron Paul had a decent showing in the Values Voters (online) straw poll, placing third behind Romney and Huckabee and ahead of Thompson. 

Update: The above results were from the online poll, while the straw poll at the event itself broke down in a much more predictable way: Huckabee the overwhelming favourite of attendees, followed by Romney, Thompson, Tancredo, Giuliani, Hunter and McCain in that order.

He [Huckabee] also hit on the right subject areas – abortion, gay marriage, immigration, appointment of federal judges — and was the only candidate to drop the word “Islamofascism” into his speech this weekend. ~Kate Sheppard

Clearly, Huckabee is quite happy to use crazy neocon and Santorumesque rhetoric in making his pitch.  In the end, despite his occasionally reasonable statements, Huckabee is definitely not a candidate for foreign policy realists and non-interventionists.  Anyone who uses the word Islamofascism without irony cannot be taken seriously, and should never be entrusted with any policymaking responsibilities.

Preemptive cultural surrender will be the defining issue of this upcoming election. ~Bill Bennett

First of all, if it were going to be the defining issue of the upcoming election it would need to have a much catchier name than “preemptive cultural surrender.”

The new advocacy of containment may stem from a substantial gap between Russian and U.S. aspirations. U.S. diplomacy seeks to transform what Washington considers “nondemocratic” governments around the world, reordering entire regions in the process. Russia, with its experience with revolution and extremism, cannot subscribe to any such ideologically driven project, especially one that comes from abroad. The Cold War represented a step away from the Westphalian standard of state sovereignty, which placed values beyond the scope of intergovernmental relations. A return to Cold War theories such as containment will only lead to confrontation. ~Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

Jim Ogonowski is the most famous special election loser most people have never heard of.  Some are taking his close defeat (in Massachusetts) as proof that anti-incumbency and “change” are the things driving voters this cycle, and that our “closely divided electorate” is actually closely divided again.  Ruffini takes it as proof that “we can finally dispense with the talk of 2008 being another 2006 for Democrats.”  It would help the strength of this claim if most of the people at TownHall had actually thought that 2006 would be a 2006 for the Democrats. 

But it isn’t just the TownHall criers who see this election as potentially significant: Jim Antle and Dave Weigel were talking about this race before the Fightin’ Fifth became a Republican talking point.  Weigel attributes Ogonowski’s loss not only to the extremely adverse conditions of running as a Republican in Massachusetts, but also to Ogonowski’s choice to oppose S-CHIP using anti-immigration rhetoric.  It seems equally likely that Ogonowski performed as well as he did (45%, four points better than Bush ran in the district in ’04) because he tried to recast a highly unpopular position (opposing S-CHIP) in more popular–and populist–language.  However, Weigel does make the right point when he notes, “neither party is brimming with farmer-soldiers whose brothers died on 9/11 and who are ready to work themselves ragged.” 

For Ogonowski’s campaign to serve as a GOP model for next year’s House races, the Republicans would need to recruit candidates as dedicated and appealing as Ogonowski.  Right now, Republican candidate recruitment is going badly, since many local pols who might be interested in making a run for Congress see next year as a disaster and don’t want to be part of it.  A demoralised party base, anemic fundraising and an effectively broke NRCC all mean that you’re not going to have many war veteran Jim Ogonowskis charging into deep blue territory.  It means that you’re going to have virtual no-name rookies trying to recapture territory that your side never should have lost in the first place (TX-22, FL-16, etc.).     

Also, no one seems to be paying attention to this, but the sheer number of votes cast in the special election was much lower than it was even in an uncontested general election last fall.  Turnout at this election was less than half of what it was in ’06, when Meehan was running without opposition.  ’06 had 50,000 fewer total votes than the contested ’04 race, in which the Republican received 88,232 votes, over forty thousand more than Ogonowski received (47,770).  What this means is that Ogonowski, with his service record, notable personal story, generally well-run campaign and work ethic, barely managed to bring out half of the Republican voters of the 5th.  Tsongas, for her part, only motivated about a third of Meehan’s ’06 voters to show up, but this is typical for the two parties in a special election.  In other words, 45% is probably the very best the GOP could have hoped to get in this election, and it achieved that goal.  It will be downhill from here. 

As MA-05 demonstrates quite nicely, Republicans tend to turn out at a greater rate at special, off-year and midterm elections and have done so for a very long time.  Presidential election years tend to have the best turnout for Democratic voters, because their voters tend to turn out at the highest rates when they are mobilised to back the presidential nominee.  That means that next year could conceivably be worse for the Republicans than last year, and the competitiveness in MA-05, to the extent that it has broader significance, vastly exaggerates the GOP’s appeal to the voters.  In any case, next year’s results from Massachusetts are very likely going to be a lot more lopsided than was Ogonowski’s run. 

Following the same logic being applied by Republican boosters to the MA-05 race, the very close IL-06 open race last year between Pete Roskam and Tammy Duckworth (a double amputee Iraq war helicopter pilot) is evidence that even DuPage County could turn Democratic.  Taking such open elections, especially when they are special elections in an off year, as evidence of a national trend seems mistaken, and the fact that it is being taken as a sign of things to come rather reflects the desperation of Republican observers who really need to find something they can use to mobilise their side.  It seems to me that the incumbent party very often wins such open elections in traditionally safe districts by relatively narrow margins.  Roskam won 51-49 in a district that Henry Hyde had routinely won with more than 55% of the vote.  If we grant that Ogonowski was a much better candidate than Duckworth (and everyone will grant this), we should not be terribly surprised that he performed well against Paul Tsongas’ widow, who may have had the advantages of establishment and name recognition, but who evidently did not have a lot more than that as a candidate.

Update: Dig a little deeper, and the GOP boosting of this election makes even less sense.  Apparently, a good number of local progressives resented the party machine foisting Tsongas on the voters and sat the election out.  I’ve already noted the turnout gap between the two sides in this election, and this helps to explain some of it. 

Also, it’s worth noting that the Massachusetts Republican Party is a “shambles” right now.  One of the many knocks on Romney’s tenure is that he did little or no party-building when he was governor.  This represents a striking contrast with the Democrats in Ohio, who were surging after Kerry’s close loss in 2004 and who were in the process of selecting strong candidates for Senate and governor for ’06 when Hackett made his failed challenge to Jean Schmidt.  Like Ogonowski, Hackett was a veteran with no prior political experience.  The Democrats were pinning their hopes as much on the symbolic appeal of a war veteran candidate as the Republicans were pinning theirs on the appeal of a relative of a 9/11 victim.  In the end, the voters who came out for the special election stuck with the incumbent party (and Schmidt narrowly retained her seat in ’06 as well). 

Given what I’ve already said about the differences between the parties with respect to special election turnout, Hackett’s strong showing was evidence of a surging Democratic Party in Ohio while Ogonowski’s result is evidence of Northeastern Republicans in disarray.  If you check the electoral history of Ohio’s 2nd District (which is very easy to do these days, which makes me wonder why it seems that no one has bothered to do this), you can see that the drop-off in support for Schmidt in the special election relative to the level of support for Portman, the House member she was trying to replace, was huge.  Except for the ’04 presidential year, when overall turnout in the district soared, Hackett’s special election result represented one of the best showings for a Democrat in that district in the last decade before ’06.  He outperformed the Democratic candidate for the general in ’02 and was within 10,000 votes of matching the 2000 Democratic candidate’s tally.  Schmidt meanwhile got only 26% of Portman’s 2004 votes, while Hackett held on to 63% of his ’04 counterpart’s votes.  Schmidt’s performance relative to the strength of her predecessor was significantly worse than Tsongas’, and Hackett’s performance was significantly better than Ogonowski’s.  Republicans in Ohio were turning out at a rate so much lower than the norm for Republican voters in special elections that it was quite rightly taken as a sign of the GOPocalypse.

Matt Continetti notes economic and business conservatives’ wariness about Huckabee, but then goes on to add that Huckabee’s foreign policy may actually be insufficient for “national security conservatives.”  As Continetti puts it, these people have “reason to doubt Huckabee’s seriousness in prosecuting the war on terror and carrying the Bush Doctrine into the next administration.”  Since Huckabee’s feints in the direction of a “humble” foreign policy have never seemed very compelling to me, I confess that it had never occurred to me that he could have exposed himself as weak in the eyes of interventionists.  What terrible things did the man say that have apparently put him in such a bind? 

At the CFR CSIS he said:

This Administration’s bunker mentality has been counter-productive both at home and abroad.  They have done as poor a job of communicating and consulting with other countries as they have with the American people.   

This seems to be a basically true observation.  Huckabee could very easily be making these criticisms as a hawk who thinks that the administration has failed to “name the enemy,” to use a favourite jingo phrase, and has failed to “explain to the people” the stakes and costs of the war.
It’s true, he did say this:

We don’t merely tolerate diversity, we embrace and celebrate it. 

But he is making his drippy remarks in the context of talking about how different we are from “Islamic extremists.”  Huckabee went on to say:

It takes an enormous leap of imagination to understand what these people are about, that they really do want to kill every last one of us and destroy civilization as we know it.   

This should put him right at home with the people Continetti is talking about.  The man name-checks Sayyid Qutb and talks about the need to understand the thinking of the enemy.  Granted, for some interventionists any call to understanding is painful and alien, but it’s not clear how Huckabee has failed the “seriousness” test as seriousness is defined by these folks.  He even comes back to his favourite theme of linking the jihadis to the culture of death–it’s new fusionism in action!  (In case I need to make it clear, I don’t think this is a good thing.)  Where did Huck go wrong?

Huckabee talks about the failure of European integration of its Muslims while praising the wonders of assimilationism here.  This stuff was supposed to be music to the ears of “national security conservatives.”  But, wait, I think I am seeing a weakness in Huckabee’s otherwise solid jingo wall:

We have to understand that while educated Muslims in Europe may not be materially deprived, many of them feel socially and emotionally deprived by a lack of acceptance. 

Anytime you use the phrase “emotionally deprived,” your favourability with the voters Continetti is talking about is going to go down.  This sort of language veers dangerously towards the idea that policies have some relationship to terrorism and the prevention of terrorism.  It also sounds a little too therapeutic for most people on the right.  Then there was this:

We can’t ‘export’ democracy as if it was Coca Cola or KFC, but we can nurture native moderate forces in all these countries where Al Qaeda seeks to replace modern evil with medieval evil.

Er, who’s the “modern evil”?  That’s a bit of a puzzle, but otherwise Huckabee is on potentially solid ground as far as “carrying the Bush Doctrine into the next administration” goes.  He expresses some greater skepticism of democratisation, but doesn’t seem to fundamentally disagree with the assumptions of the Bush Doctrine.  Instead of Second Inaugural-style lunacy, Huckabee proposes a milder form of madness:

My goal in the Muslim world is to correctly calibrate a course between maintaining stability and promoting democracy.  It is self-defeating to try to accomplish too much too soon, you just have elections where extremists win, but it’s equally self-defeating to do nothing. 

He accepts the indictment against realism that the pursuit of stability is unacceptable, which is one of the reasons why I continue to find Huckabee unacceptable. 

Huckabee may have gotten himself into some trouble here:

First, we have to destroy the terrorists who already exist, then we have to attack the underlying conditions that breed terror, by helping to improve health and basic quality of life, create schools that offer an alternative to the extremist madrassas that turn impressionable children into killers, create jobs and opportunity and hope, encourage a free press, fair courts, and other institutions that promote democracy. 

“Underlying conditions” sounds an awful lot like “root causes,” which usually receive such mocking from the people Continetti calls “national security conservatives.”  On the whole, however, this doesn’t sound that far removed from what Romney has been saying.  However, he summons up an association he might have wanted to avoid:

As for the underlying dispute between them that’s been going on for almost fourteen hundred years, we don’t have a dog in that fight. 

References to dogs and fights grate on neocon ears, since this is the language used by James Baker about Yugoslavia (and he was right) and usually belongs on the indictment of realism.  But when you look closer, you can see that Huckabee is no realist (far from it!):

Our enemy is Islamic extremism in all its guises. 

Apparently that includes every “extremist” on earth, no matter whom he’s fighting or why.  Of course there’s no conceptual coherence to any of this–he belittles the Saudis for backing “Sunni extremists” while praising our efforts to support…Sunni extremists in western Iraq.  He does nonetheless occasionally say strangely intelligent things:

I’d rather have more people in Langley, so we can deploy fewer in Baghdad.   

Then he says things that must really annoy them over at the Standard:

The difference in America’s mission is that Al Qaeda must be destroyed as a movement, while Iran just has to be contained as a nation.

Obviously Huckabee didn’t get the memo that containment is for losers.  By mentioning containment, despite his perfect willingness to launch attacks on Iran, he has made himself seem less “serious” to the hawks, which is some evidence that he is at least not as irresponsible as they are.  Not to worry, though, he’s still sticking to the main points of the script:

To contain Iran, it is essential to win in Iraq. 

But then he goes and “ruins” it all by talking about robust diplomacy!  He then quickly “saves” himself with a pointless call for divestment from Iran.  But then he really hurts himself with the “national security conservatives” when he says:

While there can be no rational dealing with Al Qaeda, Iran is a nation state looking for regional power, it plays the normal power politics that we understand and can skillfully pursue, and we have substantive issues to negotiate with them. 

This sounds unusually sensible.  It will probably completely undermine his reputation with the Persophobes who think that there can never been any real negotiations with Iran, but it might just make him seem remotely sane enough to be entrusted with power.  He seems to be leaving the door open to restoring diplomatic relations with Tehran, while also stating his willingness to bomb them.  This is a terribly split-minded view of things, but it might be just the right balance of hawkishness and sanity to win over a good number of voters.  But, before anyone gets too excited, Huckabee really does go off the rails and begins making an extended argument for launching strikes into Pakistan without Islamabad’s approval.  As foolish as I think this is, Huckabee does also manage to say some sensible things about Musharraf that need to be said.  Then he turns around and recites the talking points about the “surge” and “bottom-up reconciliation.” 

There are a lot of things there that ought to satisfy interventionists, a few lines that realists will like, and very little to generate enthusiasm among antiwar conservatives.  Frankly, whatever you think about his policy proposals, his CFR speech is one of the most substantive addresses on foreign policy this year.  Any knock on Huckabee that he is “light” or weak on foreign policy seems plainly wrong to me.

Rod writes:

But I think he [Huckabee]’s going to get the GOP nomination in 2012. What think ye?

I agree with Rod that Huckabee is not going anywhere this time, even if he should somehow win in Iowa, which I have already argued won’t happen.  But what about the next time around?  Assuming that the eventual GOP nominee this time will be defeated next November, and he very likely will be, it’s not unthinkable that Huckabee could win the nomination. 

However, for this to happen at least two things are essential. 1) He must not be the VP nominee this time (a failed Veep nominee never gets his own chance, unless he has actually been, as Mondale was, at least Vice President at some point before).  2) In the event of a Giuliani nomination, he must not endorse the nominee.  Any strong social conservative, pro-life politician who endorses a Giuliani ticket will suffer the curse of Santorum in the next cycle (being abandoned by many of the very pro-life voters whose cause the politician had made a central part of his career).  Any pro-life politician on a Giuliani ticket will be finished. 

Also, Huckabee would need to cultivate a position as an informal opposition leader during the next administration.  However, he would probably have some strong competition in another open GOP race in ’12 against a number of other governors or former governors (perhaps Pawlenty, Riley, the ever-looming Jeb Bush or perhaps even a very strong Charlie Crist).  Either Pawlenty or Riley could undermine Huckabee’s claim to his mix of social conservatism, reformism and populism, and the possibility of having a big-state governor on the ticket would limit the appeal of an Arkansan (who will have been out of office for five years by the time the first votes are cast in ’12).  Were it not for his name, Jeb Bush would easily overshadow all other probable entrants for ’12.  Now a Bush-Huckabee ’12 ticket would not be such a far-fetched idea, awful as it seems to me, but I just don’t see Huckabee’s name in the top position. 

Reihan makes a number of good points here*, and if I had taken the time to write a longer response to Brooks’ latest I would have had to acknowledge that there is certainly something to Brooks’ contention that Huckabee ought to be taken more seriously and should be seen as more of a first-tier candidate.  What I wanted to say in my short post was simply that one of the key reasons that Brooks gives (Huckabee’s acceptability to “all factions”) is pretty questionable.  Brooks says this as a way of distinguishing Huckabee from the leaders of the pack, but Huckabee has as many perceived flaws as, if not actually more such flaws than, some of the leaders.  

That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t also got a number of electoral strengths (his mild Main Street populism, his foreign policy mix of national interest and talk of honour, his Giuliani-esque embrace of border security while being pretty liberal on immigration policy itself).  Then again, some of these strengths can be liabilities in a Republican primary contest and some undermine him with other voters.  His corporation-bashing is good, populist fun, but it hardly helps his already anemic fundraising, and his sympathy for American workers seems to be entirely out of whack with his broader immigration position and his advocacy for a consumption tax.  He talks a good game on a number of things at the moment, but perusing his record gives the groups I mentioned a very different view of the man.   

As I’m sure Reihan knows, the Club for Growth really dislikes Huckabee’s record on taxes.  This would be where Reihan says that this is actually a mark in Huckabee’s favour, because people backed by the Club for Growth have pretty bad electability.  Nonetheless, in the primaries the Club has disproportionately great influence and their “pro-growth” views carry weight with many activists.  Huckabee has also received a “D” grade on economic policy from Cato for his tenure as governor.  Again, Reihan could ask, “How many divisions does the Cato Institute have?”  The number would not be large.  But the reasons why Huckabee might very well be a successful general election candidate are the reasons why he will have trouble gaining traction in the early primaries.  Does he undo some of this damage with his support for the Fair Tax?  Perhaps, but the charge of opportunism hurts as much as “vagueness” and “flexibility” help.  The same goes for his discovery of border security.  On the war, his position is not a liability with most core GOP voters, but it seems to me that antiwar conservatives have to have been put off by his commitment to remain in Iraq in the name of “honour.” 

Update: Ross has more.

Incidentally, aside from his having an agreeable personality and executive experience, what substantially distinguishes Huckabee’s social conservatism plus populist streak from a similar Gary Bauer-type candidacy?  What policies does Huckabee advocate that should make him more appealing than a Bauer?

*I would normally be writing this at the Scene, but so far the new interface has a nasty habit of making my browser crash, so this will have to do for now. 

Evidently, I am a technological moron.