Romney vs. Huckabee in 2012

It's way too early to start making predictions but I'm going to do it anyway. Senator McCain certainly has a chance of winning this November, but right now the smart money is on Senator Obama. If Obama does win, who will be the Republican nominee in 2012? A story in the Washington Post today sheds light on this question, pointing out the recent trend in Republican politics of nominating the candidate that came in second in the previous contest.

When you go back more than 30 years to the birth of the modern presidential primary system, in fact, the only Republican to have won his party's nomination for president without having come in second in the previous open primary election was George W. Bush, who sought the presidency for the first time in 2000. But even this is barely an exception to the rule, because the Republican who came in second in the previous open election, in 1996, was Pat Buchanan -- and he ran for president in 2000 as the candidate of the Reform Party.

At this point in the campaign, Romney is considered the runner up to McCain and is well-positioned to win the nomination in four years should McCain lose this November. This explains why Governor Huckabee has stubbornly refused to withdraw from the race. He wants to run again and wants to be seen as the true runner up in this year's contest. Hopefully Republicans will remember that this race was really between McCain and Romney, and that it was Romney who quickly withdrew and graciously backed the eventual nominee.

Do not trust Huck

I was never a huge fan of Governor Huckabee but now I've come to really dislike him. He should have withdrawn after Governor Romney got out of the race. But no, he said he still had a chance to win and would carry his campaign forward to the convention in the hopes that conservatives would rally around him. That hasn't happened.

This week Huckabee was given another chance to get out of the race when Romney endorsed Senator McCain and encouraged his pledged delegates to support the Senator. Unfortunately, he decided to press on, perhaps so he can continue to make TV appearances.

The worst of it is that he continues to convince some Americans to send him $20 checks even though he will never win the nomination. If he is willing to rip these people off, I'm certiain that I can't trust him with my tax dollars.

Huckabee started out as a quick-witted, populist candidate. He's now a phony, power-loving televangelist.

Where to Next?: Huckabee the Irresponsible -- Part II

Mike Huckabee has succeeded in ensuring that John McCain captures the Republican nomination. Along the way he has disparaged fiscal conservatism, threatened to turn our Republic into a theonomy, and demonstrated a peurile understanding of foreign policy issues. In short, as the perceived political spokesman for evangelicals, he has confirmed nearly every stereotype our intellectual and political opponents have cast of us over the last 40 years.

This hurts the evangelical movement not only in the political arena but more generally in our civic efforts. Huckabee has harmed the efforts of evangelicals involved in charity and economic development by suggesting that government can do the job better. Huckabee has made it more difficult for evangelicals to engage in political and civic discourse with his "us vs. them" rhetoric. Huckabee has given evangelicals in the business world real cause for concern by defending his old tax-and-spend gubernatorial habits. Huckabee has impeded the cause of evangelical moral and legal philosophy by rejecting arguments from public reason in favor of theonomous dogmas.

However, if we evangelical conservatives are to rid ourselves of the Huckabee legacy, it is not enough for us merely to disavow the man. We must also figure out where we go from here. By now we should have inferred that no baby-boom, conservative evangelical standard-bearer is going to emerge from the Kansas wheat fields (a la Brownback), the hills of western Virginia (a la Falwell), the Colorado front range (a la Dobson), or a little town called Hope (a la you-know-who) to lead us into the future.

This is not to disparage the Herculean efforts of the Baby Boomer evangelicals -- Dobson, Falwell, Robertson, Schlafly, and others -- who between 1973 and 2004 convinced evangelicals to emerge from their isolation and who built arguably the most influential cultural and political force in American politics today. It is to suggest that those leaders can carry evangelicalism only so far. The Boomer leaders raised public evangelicalism from infancy into adolescence. Now the movement must step out on its own into adulthood.

Evangelicals must continue to move forward to face the challenges facing a new generation. We cannot afford to live our public lives as if preserved in amber. And if evangelicals are to carry public reason seasoned with grace into the public sphere, we must, put simply, grow up. As if they were ill-fitting jeans and ratty t-shirts, we must shed immature conceptions of the public good, of economic progress, of international relations.

Theonomous assertions got us this far, but we must move beyond them. Any argument that begins, "The Bible says..." should never pass our lips or appear in our writings. We should at all times invoke God's blessing, but never his mandate. We need to resist the temptation to believe that God has made us responsible for eradicating poverty or preventing infant mortality, even as we freely give of ourselves to the poor, the ill, and the downtrodden. We need to demonstrate enthusiasm for the complexities and messiness of free markets and rebuke those who would employ government to tidy things up.

More than anything, we need to be comfortable in our own skin. We don't need Mike Huckabee, or even Chuck Norris, to show the world how cool we are. To the contrary. We need to resist the urge to accomodate, to fit in with secular elitists. We might very well be heading into a dark period in American history, a period from which America will emerge weaker, more timid, less optimistic. Someday, maybe several years from now, America will desperately need light. We have the Light of the world. Will we have an introduction ready?

Huckabee the Irresponsible -- Part I

If McCain secures the Republican nomination, we will of course have Mike Huckabee to blame. The Huckster has succeeded in drawing just enough support in key states to split the conservative vote and to make a McCain nomination seem inevitable. If McCain puts this thing out of reach today, history will remember Mike Huckabee as the man who prevented conservatives from placing a conservative at the head of the Republican ticket in 2008.

But what if Mitt Romney pulls this off? Suppose Mitt today wins California, Georgia, Massachusetts, and pulls an upset in one more state (Tennessee? Missouri?). Suppose Mitt then carries that momentum into Louisiana, Washington, Kansas, and beyond. Supppose Mitt wins the nomination. What will Mike Huckabee's legacy be in that case?

Unfortunately, the media have been portraying Huckabee as the new political spokesman for the evangelical movement. This is unfortunate and unfair. Huckabee does not in fact represent evangelicals, he merely represents one of the two distasteful elements in evangelicalism: the Know Nothings. But because we evangelicals are a rather egalitarian lot, and have no official spokespersons, this is an area in which perception matters at least as much as reality. So if the world perceives that Mike Huckabee represents evangelicals then Mike Huckabee does, for all practical purposes, represent evangelicals.

And what if the world perceives that, despite their best efforts, supporters of Mike Huckabee failed to prevent Mitt Romney from securing the nomination? In that instance, evangelicals appear not merely to be morons but politically inept morons.

Now, I point out this Hobson's choice not because I care one whit about Mike Huckabee's legacy. (In all events, I am still holding out hope for a Romney victory, and will do so until he concedes.) I make this point only to demonstrate some of the damage that Huckabee has caused to evangelicalism. More on the implications of this damage in Part II, to come.

Audacity or shamelessness?

Work prevented me from commenting on this article yesterday, but I cannot let it pass into the e-archives without criticism. Michael Brendan Dougherty suggests in his article, The Audacity of Huck, that Huckabee's importance in this election cycle may arise out of his representation of a new evangelical political movement. According to Dougherty, Huckabee leads an evangelical groundswell that, no longer content to play second violin in the Republican orchestra, is bucking the conservative establishment.

I am not the only one here who thinks a Huckabee nomination would be a disaster for both the Republican party and the conservative movement. And perhaps I am not representative of evangelicals generally. But Mike Huckabee does not represent me. And I am anything but an establishment conservative. I grew up the oldest of six children in a ten-foot trailer. As a formerly-poor, currently-evangelical conservative, I resent Mike Huckabee's demagoguery.

And it is here that Dougherty touches upon the most irritating aspect of the Huckabee campaign. Huck invokes the identity politics that historically has been within the special purview of the Left. It is insulting to suggest that we evangelicals have a moral disagreement about poverty (for example). I expect that type of insult from Barack Obama. To hear it from Huckabee is galling.

I would love nothing more than to vote for a thoughtful, courageous evangelical candidate for President. So when Huckabee first announced his candidacy I was excited. I was prepared to support him. I wanted to like him. Then he opened his mouth and started talking. And it's all gone downhill from there.

Let me be clear: Mike Huckabee does not speak for this evangelical.

Who is the "changiest" candidate of them all?

Is anyone else sick of the "change" jargon? Might as well have a little fun with it...

Beneficiaries of evangelical conceit

Two groups of pharisees are prominent within evangelicalism. These two groups seem to be enjoying a disproportionate measure of influence this election cycle. And for better or worse, they have thrown their weight behind Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee.

The first group, what I call the Pat Robertson Know-Nothings, have for years embarassed serious, thoughtful evangelicals with their inflated rhetoric and simplistic policy proscriptions. This group thinks that solo scriptura is a mode of constitutional interpretation. These folks will patiently (God bless 'em) spend an hour repeating over and over to their secular friends their reasoning that same-sex marriage is bad because the Bible says so. And San Francisco endures earthquakes because it hosts a gay pride parade.

Huckabee enthrals the Know-Nothings. They love him. And when Huck declames that his health care policy proposals follow from the Golden Rule, the Know-Nothings rush to man the phone banks. This is not to suggest that thoughtful evangelicals cannot or do not support Huck. It is to suggest that Huckabee has cornered the Know-Nothings market.

A second group of evangelical pharisees are the Jim Wallis Accomodaters. What these folks want more than anything is an invitation to the cocktail party. They love being seen with secular Liberals because (they assume) talking about poor people with the academic and cultural elite demonstrates their enlightenment. Unlike their knuckle-dragging cousins, the Theocrats, the Accomodaters care about the poor, the downtrodden, the sick, and puppies. Especially puppies.

I have been unable to locate any poll data on this, but in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, an appreciable number of Accomodaters are backing Obama. This is a perfect fit, of course. Like the Accomodaters, Obama defies commitment to any particular set of convictions. No one knows what he believes. Sure, there's retreat from Iraq, single-payer health care, and ambiguous proposals to rob from the rich and give to the poor, but those positions are de rigueur in the Democratic party these days. What really sets Obama apart is his commitment to Hope. He is unequivocally and without reservation opposed to darkness, despair, and puppy-killing. Unlike the Theocrats. And Hillary. I suppose.