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Friday, January 04, 2008
A RENAISSANCE OF BELIEF. This is a reality check for all you earnest Huckabee supporters. You may think you're striking a blow for the religious right by flocking to his banner, but that deep, consuming impetus you're feeling is not so much the victorious charge of crusaders as the mob lunacy of lemmings. If you succeed in nominating Huckabee, you will be putting the sword to your own political influence in this country for the remainder of your lifetimes. I kid you not.
I'm going to tell you the things no one else is willing to say. The Democrats won't say them because the Huck-a-Boom is, to them, an orgasmically delicious confirmation of all the worst things they have ever thought about you, and they will be ecstatically pleased to watch you destroy yourselves in his behalf. The Republicans -- even the staunchest conservatives who have supported your causes in the past -- won't say them because they don't want what the liberals think about you to be accurate, and they are deathly afraid that it is. Their rapidly fading hope is that you'll come to your senses before the awful truth has to be dumped on your heads like a 55-gallon drum of ice-cold gatorade. In short, they're afraid of pissing you off. But I don't want the liberals to win, and I don't care if I hurt your feelings. Because you're being dopes.
There are only two possibilities about who Mike Huckabee is. The first is that he's a sincere evangelical Christian who regards the world in the simple terms he says he does. The second is that he's a cunning politician who was born and raised among people of faith like you and has learned how to exploit your faith to advance his own career. Both of these possibilities are disasters waiting to happen.
If he's the good-hearted preacher who just happened to become governor of Arkansas by an accident of circumstance rather than calculated ambition, he's in way over his head. For example, when Huckabee claimed he was receiving foreign policy advice from John Bolton, he was either misrepresenting the facts or being absurdly naive. No matter how good he is at heart, the United States and the world at large can't afford a president who thinks he is learning foreign policy via email. And to the extent that you are willing to overlook this kind of blunder, you are telling the 70 percent of your fellow citizens who don't believe a literal interpretation of the Bible is the best credential for political leadership that your powers of judgment are nil. Huckabee the Preacher will be mocked and ridiculed and manipulated into the worst electoral disaster in the history of the Republican Party. Have you learned nothing about Democrats? They will be absolutely ruthless about making him indistinguishable in every way from Gomer Pyle.
On the other hand, Huckabee might be an absolutely ruthless politician himself, a nominally Republican version of that other successful Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton. If he is, he could actually succeed in winning the presidency. Is this your secret hope, that he is some kind of combination Machiavellian-Christian, venal enough to do the job and yet moral enough to do it right? Forget it. That's a one-in-a-billion shot. If he has the ambition and spine to be a strong president, he is far more likely to be a Huey Long than an Abraham Lincoln -- corrupt, vindictive, hypocritical, power-mad, and criminally sly rather than intelligent. And, by the way, what are the charges that continue to attach to Huck's governorship? Corrupt, vindictive, personally greedy, tax-happy and... uh, weak on crime and immigration. Because the other likely version of a Machiavellian-Christian politician is Jimmy Carter. A weak, small-minded micro-manager whose insecurities and self-righteous conceits do appalling harm in the name of good.
But a Carter-like Huckabee will be far worse for the country than even Carter was. The insatiable destruction machine that is the Democratic Party will not be there to conceal and explain away his incompetencies, but to highlight them and pin them on the ignorant, reactionary yokels who brought him to power in the first place. If you think the left hates Bush, wait till the president is a graduate of a Baptist Bible college instead of Yale and Harvard.
By the end of a mercifully one-term Huckabee presidency, you will be lucky if all the more fundamentalist flavors of Christianity haven't been outlawed as completely as the American Communist Party. And worse than that will be the laughter, which will echo in your ears, and those of your children and their children, for all that remains of American history. Worst of all, conservatism itself will be stone cold dead as a political force in this country.
My final point is that mine is not an extreme view. Every conservative who does not share your exact religious viewpoint feels the same way about this that I do. The only difference between me and the east-coast conservative pundits who opine on Fox News and other mass media outlets is that they don't believe you'd really go through with such a totally self-destructive campaign -- and I do believe it.
Know this, though. If you do, we will never forgive you. And the country will, most likely, never recover.
Bottom Line: Mike Huckabee is a joke. Whether he turns out to be a funny joke like Governor Gatling or a deadly joke like Huey Long is largely in your hands. Try not to blow it.
