Why the GOP needs to nominate Mike Huckabee in 2012.
Over the past two weeks, the Republican Party has been conducting internal debates about the future of the party, and the fault lines have become perfectly clear. One one side are reformers like Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, David Frum and David Brooks, who argue that the GOP ought to adapt its approach to policy to try to appeal to the middle. Others, such as talk radio stalwarts like Rush Limbaugh, opt to return to the status quo ante--which is to say, how things were before Bush. As with the leadership of the British Labour Party in the 1980s and 90s, these folks believe that one more push will finally see the party successful. And the Labour Party example is instructive: they pushed in 1983. And then again in 1987. And then again in 1992. And they would have tried again in 1997, were it not for the arrival of a reform-minded leader by the name of Tony Blair who turned things around.
Now, of course, such analogies are crude and often abstract out so many details that they become little more than bromides. Nevertheless, the GOP must modernize in some respect. The public mistrusts them on virtually every issue on which there is polling: in the Clinton years, the Republican polling advantage on defense issues nudged 2 to 1. It's now even-up as a result of the Iraq disaster and the deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan, and if Obama manages to conduct a successful foreign policy and keeps America safe there is the real possibility that the Democrats will become the party that owns the defense issue going forward. With the Dems registering overwhelming advantages on every domestic policy issue and possibly foreign policy going forward, the GOP will have nowhere to go and no issue upon which to strike up an insurgency. How's that plan looking now, Rush?
So, reform is essential for future Republican success. But how to go about it? This is where the reformers diverge. Frum and Brooks, as well as Kathleen Parker, believe that social conservatives have become a drag on the Republicans' fortunes. Douthat, Salam, and Ramesh Ponnuru believe that the economic policies of the Bush years have become the chief culprit of GOP failure. And few mainstream conservative voices, aside from the exiled likes of Chuck Hagel and the ever-perceptive Daniel Larison, believe that the party's foreign policy has been the problem, and the neocons disbelieve this despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In fact, perhaps the theoretically easiest path to reform within the GOP would be to cut the neocons loose. After all, there aren't too many of them. And the "tax cuts for the rich so help me God" class of tax raiders, like Grover Norquist, are hardly numerous in number either. Polling suggests that fewer than half of Republicans believe that tax cuts are necessary at this point, and as much as a third believe in raising taxes to pay for the deficit. A third of the GOP dissents on the party's signature issue? What is going on here? Why do these small groups have all this power?
The answer is pretty simple: the tax raiders control the GOP's money spigot. Turning against these folks would make the Republicans further undermatched to the Democrats' new small-donor funding model. And the neocons (such as Bill Kristol) are, well, just there: they're well-known and well-connected, and they are prominent in conservative media. These two groups make up most of the conservative coalition, and they tend to be hostile to the party's evangelical wing. As someone who is sympathetic to that hostility I would like to agree with this analysis, but it's just wrong. These groups got John McCain the nomination after their preferred candidate, Mitt Romney, couldn't close the deal with voters. McCain ran a perfect conservative establishmentarian campaign, running on the "surge" in Iraq and foreign policy hawkishness in general, as well as concluding with ranting and raving about Obama's "socialism", presumably because he supports progressive taxation, as does most of the country and even McCain himself. McCain shied away from social issues--two states legalized gay marriage during the 2008 race and these developments were hardly mentioned--and he still lost. George W. Bush ran largely on social issues in 2004 and won. As someone who tends toward social liberalism I wish this wasn't true, but it is: there is simply no evidence that social conservatism is a loser for the GOP at this point. Now, there are some counterexamples to my thesis: the hateful Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO) was defeated in a House race this year, for example, in a generally Republican district. But McCain didn't emphasize social issues this year--in fact, he went out of his way not to give the impression that he was far more moderate here than he was, as part of a plan to win over disaffected Hillary Clinton voters from the Democratic primaries. It didn't work. Blaming sociocons, in other words, doesn't work. It's very, very difficult to make a direct case that they are responsible for the party's downfall.
The neocons and tax raiders, on the other hand, are directly responsible for the major failures of the Bush 43 years. One can draw a direct line from neocon ideology to Iraq. One can draw a direct line from the tax raiders' policies to the poor economy and rising wage inequality in America, not to mention rising debt and deficits. And one can squarely blame moneycons for the deregulation fetish that was the direct cause of the financial collapse this year. None of these arguments are really debatable, either. They are facts, and they are directly attributable to the flawed philosophies of the tax raiders and the neocons. Ditching these folks and their ideas and enacting reasonable, center-right policies rather than their radical drivel would be good for the Republican Party, and for America. All that the GOP needs is a George McGovern figure to do it.
Yes, you heard me right: the GOP needs a McGovern, which in this case means someone who will clean out the old establishment and the old hacks and lay the seeds for rejuvenation. Of course, McGovern didn't work out too well for the Democrats: he was a legendarily inept candidate, and the man he laid the way for was Jimmy Carter, who wasn't terribly apt himself. But McGovern changed the power structure of the Democratic Party in a beneficial way, and did away with the establishment for good. And right now the Republicans desperately need to clean house and find new establishmentarians with sounder ideas. The only way I can think of doing that would be by a grassroots revolt against the party elders, and I can think of only two conservative politicians who could theoretically pull such a thing off: Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. Palin is a non-starter here: she is almost unbelievably ignorant of public policy and political philosophy, nor does she have any sort of governing strategy or vision for the future.
Huckabee, on the other hand, does posess most of these things. He became something of a punchline this year because of his ignorance on any number of issues, it is true. Part of this problem, though, was no doubt due to inadequate preparation because Huck never thought he would be the nominee. On issues on which he is well-versed, such as faith, he is thoughtful, intelligent and persuasive. He could be a plausible Republican candidate against Obama in 2012, and while I somehow doubt he could win, he could perhaps fill the role of another evangelical candidate who never won but who radically reformed his party in his own image: William Jennings Bryan. Huckabee could expel the moneygrubbers and warmongers from the GOP fold and move the party toward a more reasonable course in those directions.
The only question that remains is: would he do it if given the chance? My answer is a qualified yes. Huck has shown a propensity to piss on the moneycon faction: calling the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group whose primary goal these days seems to be collecting scalps of insufficiently raiderish Republicans, the "Club for Greed" is a good indicator. His instinctual loathing of libertarians is another. Huck is not a Norquistian anti-taxer, and there is every reason to believe that he would be flexible in this area. He also publicly opposed the financial bailout this year, which should help him with Republican primary voters in 2012. Huck has supported the Iraq War for some time now, but he was notably one of the less rhetorically hawkish of the Republican candidates this year. His Foreign Affairs article was more similar to Barack Obama's than it was to Rudy Giuliani's. It's entirely possible that he's internalized the Bible's teachings on defense and war--more so than, say, Mitt Romney. And Huck starts out with plenty of enemies, which is so much the better for mounting an insurgency against the establishment. This is all undercut by the fact that Huck dropped many of his anti-establishment views upon becoming a real contender for the nomination. This is why the yes was qualified.
Let me be clear: I do not believe Mike Huckabee could assemble a successful coalition to win the presidency. Catholics hate his guts, which is why I think that he'd obviously pick Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as a running mate. Huckabee might be able to appeal to some of the old Reagan Dems if he called for some real Republican reform, and he is reportedly interested in reaching out to black voters on socially conservative grounds, which is not a bad idea but one that wouldn't work in 2012 against Barack Obama. Huck would probably lose, but it would be a loss that would sew seeds of renewal down the road. Picking, say, Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney would mean that the GOP would keep trying to execute the tax raider/neocon playbook, and the Republican Party would only spend that much longer in the wilderness.
