How to fight a Huck: don't revile his supporters.(2008 III)(Mike Huckabee)

MORE nonsense has been said and written about former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee than about any other presidential candidate. Some of his critics have accused him of being a "Dominionist"--someone who wants the government strictly to enforce all Biblical commands--because he has said that same-sex marriage contradicts "God's standards." One infelicitous comment, even repeated, hardly means that Huckabee is itching to stone adulterers. Yet even some conservatives rushed to compare him to the Taliban.

After Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses, it was widely said that the "Republican establishment" was panicked over it. Many commentators have said that his rise, and that of Sen. John McCain, shows that movement conservatism is dying, since so many movement conservatives dislike them. Does anyone remember 1996? The candidate who came closest to being a movement favorite, Phil Gramm, didn't make it to New Hampshire, while the candidates the movement liked least, Bob Dole and Patrick Buchanan, got the most primary votes. There are reasons to worry about the future of conservatism, but the fact that Republican primary voters sometimes disagree with the editors of the Wall Street Journal or of this magazine is not among them.

A SPLINTER MOVEMENT

It is true that the party establishment thinks Huckabee would lose badly in November. But it doesn't believe that he will be nominated, and thus is not panicked at the prospect. It has seen candidates it regards as unelectable win primaries before. Buchanan, for example, narrowly beat Dole in New Hampshire, and Dole was both the establishment's candidate and the frontrunner. Huckabee's victories have been comparatively trifling.

Huckabee's candidacy has less potential than Buchanan's did. Buchanan ran as a strong social conservative who disagreed with most Republicans on trade, taxes, and entitlements. He promised to rally the party's "peasants with pitchforks" against its "barons." The exit polls showed that his social conservatism was the basis of his support. His heterodoxies on economics repelled more primary voters than they attracted.

Huckabee's campaign has even less promise, because its appeal is limited to a subset of social conservatives: those who are also evangelical and born-again Protestants. His supporters get indignant when people make this point. They say that his critics and the press have pounced on his most innocuous gestures to scare non-evangelicals away from him. If President Clinton could refer to Christmas as the anniversary of "the birth of Christ," they say, Huckabee should have been able to do the same thing in a campaign ad.

There have been a few too many such incidents for it to be plausible that Huckabee is simply the naive victim of his opponents. It seems pretty clear that he has consciously tried to get evangelicals to vote for him on the basis of their shared religious views. But even if he had no such intention, the way he has campaigned--along with the predictable response to the way he has campaigned--has guaranteed that he will appeal much more to evangelicals than to other voters. Even if his opponents are at fault for characterizing him as the candidate of evangelical identity politics, in other words, he has made it easy for them to do so.