National Review editor Rich Lowry is joining what threatens to become a parade of GOP flacks and hacks who wish all GOP voters were like Mike Huckabee—bone ignorant, Pavlovian Christians who can swallow the wildest swerves of logic with nary a hint of nausea—but are more than a bit panicked to find Huckabee threatening for the GOP presidential nomination and turning the primaries into a contest over who’s God bone is biggest. Here’s Lowry.

Huckabee has declared that he doesn’t believe in evolution. Even if there are many people in America who agree with him, his position would play into the image of Republicans as the anti-science party. This would tend to push away independents and upper-income Republicans. In short, Huckabee would take a strength of the GOP and, through overplaying it, make it a weakness.

In other words, pander but don’t empower. Get Huckabee aboard the bus but for God’s sake don’t let him drive.

Lowry, because he retains a modicum of self-consciousness, doesn’t directly abhor the role of religion in the Republican meltdown. Peggy Noonan, because she doesn’t, does. Lowry does delicately skirt the question of how the GOP acquired its “anti-science party” image, which is of course by way of ridiculing any science that respectively conflicts with popular religious beliefs, interferes with corporate prerogatives, or doesn’t involve blowing things up.

He also takes care to throw in some policy-related objections, observing that Huckabee, unlike his fellow candidates who wholeheartedly support the greatest national security debacle since the War of 1812, “not only has zero national-security credentials, he basically has no foreign-policy advisers either, as a New York Times Magazine piece this Sunday makes clear.” (How is it, by the way, that every pundit and reporter in the land read that story a week before publication?)

This is in contrast to, for instance, Rudy Giuliani, who boasts Norman “Nuke Iran” Podhoretz as his go-to guy on national security.

Huckabee’s record on taxes is another policy sore spot. The Bible-struck populist raised taxes in Arkansas for the shady purpose of helping poor people, and Lowry fears that his repentant gimmick—”a sales-tax scheme that allows him to say he supports eliminating the IRS, but is so wildly implausible that it would be a liability in a general election”—isn’t sufficient to overcome the fears of those same upper-income Republicans who detest Huckabee’s insistent religiosity, in this instance because they recognize, as Lowry says, that “the public tends to support Democratic proposals for bigger government, which Republicans counter by saying that the proposals will require higher taxes.”

But Republicans like Lowry have demonstrated time and again that they can stomach any policy perversion so long as it doesn’t cost elections, and Huckabee’s tax scheme is really no weirder than most Republican attempts to dodge reality on the subject. The real problem is that Huckabee represents an entire class of people whom Lowry is happy to goad to the polls every four years in support of whoever his chosen candidate might be, with whatever rhetorical gymnastics that requires, but with whom he otherwise wants nothing to do.

Tough break, Rich.

Bookmark and Share

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks

Ask backflip blinklist BlogBookmark Bloglines BlogMarks Blogsvine BuddyMarks BUMPzee! CiteULike co.mments Connotea del.icio.us

Digg diigo DotNetKicks DropJack dzone Facebook Fark Faves Feed Me Links Friendsite folkd.com Furl Google

Hugg Jamespot Jeqq Kaboodle kirtsy linkaGoGo LinkedIn LinksMarker Ma.gnolia Mister Wong Mixx MySpace MyWeb

Netvouz Newsvine oneview OnlyWire PlugIM Propeller Reddit Rojo Segnalo Shoutwire Simpy Slashdot Sphere

Sphinn Spurl Squidoo StumbleUpon Technorati ThisNext Twitter Webride Windows Live Worlds Movies Yahoo!

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML: 

 If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™