Huckabee's win last night

I am pretty tired, so I was going to save this until tomorrow morning. However, reading Quin Hillyer's post on the American Spectator Blog got me fired up again. The topic? Mike Huckabee.

Hillyer was a reporter in Arkansas during Huck's years as governor, so he has followed him for a long time (you can tell he's worked up by the lack of self-editing):

The steady drip-drip-drip of small untruths and ethical shenanigans and the like during my time covering Huck in Arkansas turned me from a Huck admirer to (obviously) a critic. THe man lies the way Bill CLinton does, with great facility and no conscience about it. That's why I say the man is NOT authentic, that he fakes sincerity and authenticity quite well. It's all an act. As is his"nice guy" schtick. Why do you think he hired Ed Rollins? So he can play good cop to Rollins' bad cop, and blame Rollins for all the shivs his campaign sticks into his opponents. And as Mitt Romney found out when Huck did the Mormons/Jesus/Satan routine for the New York Times, Huck knows how to use a shiv. As badly as the big media (rightly) criticized Huck for those comments, they worked remarkably well to drive up Evangelical fears about Mormonism -- just as Huck intended.

Here's the thing that really gets me about Huckabee: his supporters in Iowa (Evangelical Christians) love him because they see him as honestly giving voice to their concerns. Hillyer has shown in a previous article that he's actually pretty dishonest and unethical, and he doesn't have much of a political center. Yes, he was a Baptist preacher, and apparently he knows how to play Evangelicals like a fiddle.

I have heard and read that his support comes from Evangelicals who feel like they have been taken advantage of by the Republican party. While they reliably vote Republican, those in power then ignore their concerns, or so the narative goes. Now comes Huckabee, and he promises to take care of their concerns on social issues.

(This is actually a gigantic load of crap, though. What issues important to social conservatives have Congress and our born-again Evangelical president not helped them on? Can they name one? If anything, us fiscal conservatives have gotten continually kicked in the teeth on spending.)

Fine. They can vote for whoever they want. However, they need to consider the broader implications of nominating him. The Republican coalition has been held together by 3 types of conservatives: social, fiscal, and national security. Huckabee is ONLY a social conservative, and he's liberal on the other two main parts.

Let's take a step back to 2007, though, and remember what many social conservatives and pundits were saying. If Rudy Giuliani, who is personally pro-choice and pro-gay rights, among other things, was nominated, Republicans would risk the social conservative base staying home and thus losing the election. They needed to at least nominate a consensus candidate, such as Mitt Romney (no matter what you think of him, his platform was of broad-based conservatism) for the sake of the party. This despite Rudy's pledge to nominate originalist judges to the federal courts, which is easily the most important thing he could do for social conservatives' cause.

So Evangelicals are a bunch of babies that will stay home unless one of their guys gets nominated, but us fiscal and national security conservatives have to sit back and vote for a pro-life Jimmy Carter-type in the general election in Huckabee? This is a direct assault by social conservatives on fiscal and national security ones, as they clearly don't give a crap about what we think. Go ahead, idiots, nominate Huckabee. Then watch him suffer a Goldwater-style loss as we sit home because you didn't care about us.

My message to any Evangelicals who read this (and I have no illusions that any will) is that you need to think twice before you continue voting for this guy. It's the quickest path to having activist judges on the Supreme Court put there by a Democrat.