Rich Lowry in today’s National Review Online, expressing the anxiety that the right-wing punditocracy has about Mike Huckabee, and the damage he’s doing to the conservative elite’s golden boy, Mitt Romney:
The GOP’s social conservatism inarguably has been an enormous benefit to the party throughout the past 30 years, winning over conservative Democrats and lower-income voters who otherwise might not find the Republican limited-government message appealing. That said, nominating a Southern Baptist pastor running on his religiosity would be rather overdoing it. Social conservatism has to be part of the Republican message, but it can’t be the message in its entirety.
Bold emphasis mine.
Well, that’s more candor than I expect from GOP strategists: “we like poor uneducated social conservatives, but only as long as they know their place, which is to provide votes so we can do the important stuff.” It’s a bald admission of what the left has known for a long time: the GOP uses the “God, gays, and guns” issues to bring in voters whose economic needs are utterly incongruent with the Republican message.
Lowry continues:
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: social conservatism, once you scratch the surface, is embarrassing.
Right-wing evangelicals are to the GOP what African-Americans have traditionally been to the Democrats: a group that is heavily courted come election time, but whose deepest concerns are routinely dismissed by the party elite. I’m an evangelical whose views on most issues are very different from Mike Huckabee’s. But on behalf of my “fellow believers”, I’m a bit stunned by the dismissive, patronizing tone Lowry strikes in his message.
Shorter Lowry: “Conservative evangelicals to the back of the bus, because you scare folks.”
Yeah, the Dems and Reps both love the votes of their “core” voters, but do like them to sit down and shut up once the election is won.
It should be most entertaining to watch and see which party’s workhorses wake up first and figure out that they really ain’t never gonna be allowed up to the big house with Massa, and go to form other parties that are viable in the long term.
“Rather overdoing it”. That makes Lowry sound like one of your OKOP WASPS, Hugo! His country-club elitism comes shining through, for sure.
This reminds me of that “What’s the Matter With Kansas” book.
This, rather amusingly, puts you in agreement with paleocon Daniel Larison. However, it should come as no particular surprise that elites within both the Democratic and Republican establishments have a healthy contempt for the vast majority of Americans. We do, after all, invariably continue to vote for them no matter how many times they cross and double cross us.
Even if Huckabee is an unreflective jerk, one does have to envy the fact that someone like him stands a chance to get the nomination. The closest thing Dems have in terms of an anti-establishment candidate is John Edwards, and he’s not exactly going anywhere at the moment.
That’s because he’s an anti-establishment candidate. Democrats are fine with The Poor as a concept, as long as they don’t mess up the property values.
Republicans (and here I am talking about the people who run the party, not every “R” voter) generally don’t pick their voting affiliation because they are soft-hearted embracers of the common people. They want to get and/or stay rich, they think they’re the elite and better than other people, and they sure as hell don’t appreciate all that stuff Jesus said about loving one another and not serving God and Mammon.
I love how this comment thread immediately got topic jacked to ‘Democrats aren’t any better’, ignoring the substance of Hugo’s actual post.
That’s not quite what I was saying, but don’t let me mess up a good outrage on ya.
I love how this comment thread immediately got topic jacked to ‘Democrats aren’t any better’, ignoring the substance of Hugo’s actual post.
Actually started with Hugo himself, to wit:
Right-wing evangelicals are to the GOP what African-Americans have traditionally been to the Democrats: a group that is heavily courted come election time, but whose deepest concerns are routinely dismissed by the party elite.
Hence, I agree completely with Hugo: Yeah, the Dems and Reps both love the votes of their “core” voters, but do like them to sit down and shut up once the election is won.
And this is why I don’t belong to either branch of the Republicrat Party - Hypocritical scoundrels they are, one and all, and a pox upon both their houses.
Why are you stunned? Had it not occurred to you that the people you are so dismissive of and patronizing to can also act in the same way?