Huckabee states the obvious:

To say that you’ve never thought about the origins of human life until you were nearly 60 years old — I find that hard to believe even for somebody who hasn’t run for office before, but certainly for somebody who had.

In a new FoxNews poll, McCain leads Romney nationally 48-20 with Huckabee at 19 and Paul at 5, along with 5% not knowing and 2% refusing to vote.  If you reduce it to a two-man McCain v. Romney race, the result among Republicans is McCain 62, Romney 29, 6% not knowing and 3% refusing to vote.  These numbers are almost the reverse of Bush v. McCain at this stage in 2000.  Granted, this is a national poll and is not terribly reliable for predicting actual voting, but what this seems to show is that most of the Huckabee and Paul voters simply will not go for Romney.  You do have to assume that anti-Mormonism has something to do with this, particularly among Huckabee supporters, but it is also hard to miss that Huckabee supporters have made clear in state after state that their second choice is McCain.  Perhaps these are the voters who are drawn to candidates on the basis of personality and biography and are not issues voters, in which case they align with the candidates who have received the most favourable media coverage and who appear through that coverage to be the most appealing characters. 

Romney appears to have picked up most of the hard-core anti-McCain vote by default: two months ago with the same question about a two-way race, 23% said they would not vote.  Over half of those since went to Romney, and McCain has gained only a few points.  This seems to mean that more than half of Romney’s current supporters nationwide are only coming to his side grudgingly because the McCain v. Romney match-up has now become the reality, and their preferred candidates are no longer likely to win.  That implies that Romney has a very weak base of support that has settled for him for lack of other competitive options.  Romney has managed to end up in an almost unheard-of bind: he is getting trounced nationally in a three- or four-way race, and he then actually loses ground in the two-man race his campaign is trumpeting in its latest communications.  Strangely, Huckabee’s persistence in the race, while slowly but surely killing Romney’s campaign, is also preventing McCain from delivering the fatal blow right away.  This means that a vote for Huckabee is not so much a vote for McCain as it is potentially a vote for chaos.  Indeed, at this point chaos may be the anti-McCain forces’ best and only real friend.

I understand what Rod is saying here, but I think he and Gerard Baker are making the same mistake when they describe the rise of McCain in terms of change and revolution respectively.  McCain is the essential status quo candidate, and represents continuity with the current administration on a range of questions.  Some would argue, correctly, that the current administration has not governed  conservatively using any reasonable definition of that word, and those who have opposed the administration from the right since the beginning know this better than anyone, but where McCain’s critics have embraced, indeed celebrated, the administration for the most part they have determined that McCain is apostate, anti-conservative, and so on.  In this bizarre universe, where Giuliani can be seen as one of the last of the Reaganites but Huckabee and McCain are political lepers, the people who have the most to gain by emphasising the idea of a McCain nomination representing a radical departure from conservatism are the very people who have apologised and flacked for the administration that did most of the actual damage that they fear McCain might do in the future. 

Rod is right that there are several conservatisms (around which orbit, I would add, many a Republican constituency dressed up as a pseudo-conservatism), and he is right again that these conservatisms are not coterminous with the GOP.  Indeed, one of the problems of conservatives in America today was the persistent effort to identify themselves with the party when it was riding high (“Republicans are winning because they are conservative”) and attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to wash their hands of the party’s mistakes, blunders and disasters when the public turned against the party (“Republicans lost in 2006, not conservatives”).  The horror conservatives are feeling and the loud protests they are registering at the prospect of a McCain nomination all stem from this same confusion.  If you have grown accustomed to identifying the fortunes of conservatism rather closely with the GOP, you begin to treat Republican nominees as representatives of the new direction of conservatism.  McCain could not threaten the movement, except that the movement has welded itself to the GOP in so many ways that what happens to the one affects the other as well. 

So it is a mistake to see McCain’s rise marking a “changing of the guard,” if that “changing of the guard” means “McCain’s rise is eroding the hegemony of the established conservative opinion-makers.”  On the contrary, movement leaders are setting up a gauntlet for McCain, as if they were soldiers demanding a donative for a would-be emperor, and they will finally raise him on their shields only after they have extracted that payment.  Until they receive it, they will continue to serve as the guards, so to speak, and should he come to power they will have left McCain with the unspoken threat that they will unmake him and topple him if he goes against them.  A McCain administration, as unlikely as I think it will be, would be one plagued by having constantly to give assurances to core constituencies and would be a period racked by internecine fighting within the party and movement.  The recent anti-McCain campaign has served to put McCain on notice (perhaps there are still a few true believers who think they can vault Romney to success by tearing McCain down), and perhaps he has once again “gotten the message,” as he says, but more likely the rise of McCain does not amount to a “bloodless coup” (per Baker) or a “changing of the guard,” but the beginnings of “palace” intrigues and plotting among the many factions. 

In fact, the coolness with which leading movement figures are receiving McCain, or rather the heat of their fury against him helps to secure their authority with their audiences, misleadingly give them credit for resisting the corruption of conservatism (even though they did little or nothing to stop that corruption for the past seven years and much to facilitate it) and allows them to portray themselves as oppositional, independent figures when they are nothing of the kind.  This pose of opposition and independence is the same one that many of the leading radio hosts and pundits assumed after the ’06 electoral debacle, having right up until then exhorted their audiences to support the GOP regardless of what it had done or failed to do.  This is the phony independence that permits them to retain some shred of credibility as critics when their influence is in less of a position to drive policy change (i.e., when the GOP is in the minority) after having squandered opportunities to wield influence when it might have mattered.

Since Eunomia was inaccessible on Wednesday night, I was unable to comment on the Republicans’ debate at the time.  For those who haven’t had their fill of debate commentary, I recommend the live-blogging post by Justin Raimondo, who recorded his impressions from the night at Taki’s Top Drawer.  I was watching the debate at CNN’s site and saw most of it alongside their “viewer response” graph.  The striking thing about the comparison was that Romney consistently scored well every time he spoke–it didn’t matter what he was saying–and McCain almost always scored negatively regardless of the content of his statements.  I am a poor judge of these things, since I am annoyed every time I see Romney, but he seems to have come across much better to that particular audience.  Part of this probably had to do with McCain’s foul mood and harping criticism.  If many undecided voters watched this debate, Romney should have won them over easily.  However, being the umpteenth cable network debate it was probably not seen by very many people, and the media commentary on the debate struck me as surprisingly favourable to McCain.  Casting the arguments the two had in a simple “clash of rivals” narrative, most reports did an injustice to Romney, since he did have the better of his exchanges with McCain, who was petulant and obnoxious the entire night.  Ron Paul was absolutely correct, of course, that the two were arguing over inconsequential nonsense and right again that these debates ought to be about major questions of policy.  Unfortunately, serious policy debate does not lend itself to snappy headlines and easily-digested stories, and these are the things that commentators and reporters want.

I’m not sure that it is at all reassuring for Romney’s camp that they have won the endorsement of Rick “The Venezuelans Are Coming!” Santorum.  It is fitting, I suppose, that the former Senator who sided with the incumbent, establishment, pro-choice candidate Specter in that Pennsylvania Senate primary four years ago is similarly supporting the candidate with the far less conservative record.  Things like that make conservatives and pro-lifers eager to back the one whom Santorum has named as a defender of “the conservative principles that we hold dear.”

Santorum said, “Governor Romney has a deep understanding of the important issues confronting our country today…”  Important issues such as preventing Iranian world-mastery and stopping the Venezuelan empire from conquering Argentina.

As yet another blast of “Romney will save us, if we save Romney,” this Hewitt post is unremarkable, but in its assessment of the outcome of the Democratic race and its expression of Obama-fear it is just odd:

It will be very, very difficult to defeat Barack Obama with an old face from inside the Beltway, even one with the heroism and courage that John McCain embodies.

So, if I understand Hewitt’s rationale for opposing McCain, it would better to run a phony against the candidate that the media has declared Authenticity personified than it would be to run an old veteran who supports the war, which he, Hewitt, also supports, against a young man with essentially no relevant experience who opposes it.  For someone who recoils against the “MSM-created McCain resurrection,” he doesn’t seem to be able to see through the MSM-created Obama deification.  If he did, he would know that Obama is the one adversary McCain has a chance of defeating.  It seems as if these folks are allowing both their Clinton-hatred and McCain-loathing to get the better of their judgement (which is not to say that an egregious Romney booster such as Hewitt has very good judgement in the first place).

Coulter on McCain: Ready, set, crazy! 

This is something I don’t quite understand.  I can understand the objections to McCain’s policies, which I definitely share, and I even sympathise with the deep-seated personal dislike of the man that so many have.  But how confused must you be, if you are a pro-torture, pro-war jingo (or is that jingoess in her case?), to say that you would sooner side with Hillary Clinton than John McCain?  This is absolutely batty.  Who would better suit the pro-war crowd than an inflexible, unbalanced and angry old man who has nothing to lose?  I wouldn’t dispute Clinton’s hawkish inclinations, and I think her opposition to Iraq is purely opportunistic and reflects nothing about her foreign policy views, which are interventionist and generally quite dangerous, but if you are a hawk it is inconceivable that you would prefer her to him. 

Via Ross 

Update: Suddenly Hewitt has discovered the importance of rationality in voting!

My apologies for the last few days.  As you would have seen had you checked in the last few days, the site used up its bandwidth allowance for the month and was just re-set a moment ago.  Elsewhere, I have some new posts.  Specifically, at Taki’s Top Drawer I have three new posts on McCain, Huckabee’s foreign policy, and some random thoughts on that apocryphal “better to be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian” quote we have seen so often in recent months.

Another small piece of evidence that McCain is Dole redux:I went back and found that Dole’s lifetime ACU rating in 1996 was 83, which is actually seven tenths of a point higher than McCain’s lifetime rating but close enough to be a bit uncanny.

Bush has received little attention or thanks for his compassionate reforms. This is less a reflection on him than on the political challenge of compassionate conservatism. The conservative movement gives the president no credit because it views all these priorities — foreign assistance, a federal role in education, the expansion of an entitlement — as heresies, worthy of the stake. ~Michael Gerson

It doesn’t help that these “compassionate reforms” are all monumental failures and/or appalling burdens on the national fisc of dubious value and poor implementation.  Why might no one be congratuating the President on sending unfunded mandates to the states?  Could it be that introducing vast new entitlements–when our current entitlement system is already in serious trouble over the long-term–is an irresponsible, short-sighted gamble with the wealth of future generations for the sake of brief, transitory and already vanished political gain?  No, it must be that there are unimaginative inquisitors who are intent on ripping out Bush’s bleeding heart and throwing it on the pyre.  That must be the only explanation.  What would we do without Gerson to explain these things to us?