More on Joementum and Huckenfreude

Last night, on the heels of Joe Lieberman's endorsement of John McCain, I made the case that when Joe Lieberman gives his inevitable address to the Republican National Convention, he'll be able to argue plausibly that he didn't leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left him.

Of course, Lieberman's embrace of McCain in the primary season (thereby rejecting not some but all Democratic candidates) ratchets up the likelihood of Lieberman not only speaking before the RNC, but intervening in the general election in a quasi-official way, say as a kind of Republican shadow cabinet officer. The extreme end of this thought, which no doubt we'll be hearing more of from Beltway journalists if from nowhere else, is Lieberman as the Republicans' vice-presidential nominee. That being the case, it's worth revisiting Bill Kristol's November editorial in favor of Lieberman as the GOP's veep pick. Let others dispute the wisdom of Kristol's argument; what caught my eye in re-reading the piece was the relevance of the following claim for the other big dynamic in the Republican primary contest:

McCain-Lieberman, Thompson-Lieberman, Romney-Lieberman, Huckabee-Lieberman — those sound like winning tickets to us. [emphasis mine]

Kristol leaves Giuliani off the list since Giuliani presumably can't afford a pro-choice running mate (but why not though?; if the Republicans choose Giuliani despite his manifest unacceptability to social conservatives, will picking Lieberman really affect their disposition to vote for him in the general election — it's not as if there's another pro-choicer whom any Republican would plausibly consider for the vice presidency). Notice who does make the list, though: Mike "Dogpatch" Huckabee, from whom sophisticated urbane conservatives are fleeing as fast as their legs can carry them, and whose boom is prompting calls for a bottom-up reappraisal of conservatism's proper attitude towards both the value of intellecual rigor and expertise, and the danger of overt political religiosity.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Bill Kristol speaks for the whole of the Weekly Standard, let alone the whole of the American right, but many of the conservative pundits, bloggers, and intellectuals currently losing it over the prospect of a Huckabee nomination hold views relevantly similar to Kristol's own (e.g. Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, and Stephen Hayes lampooning "Huckaplomacy" in the pages of the Weekly Standard itself). Refer back to Kristol's boosterism for the Lieberman-for-VP concept, and his specific locution: "Huckabee-Lieberman" sounds "like a winning ticket" not just to him, but "to us." So presumably Kristol is speaking for someone other than himself.

What happened? It was less than one month ago that the Kristol piece came out, and Huckabee-Lieberman was an idea that was not merely tolerable, but winning, to Kristol et al. Now that Huckabee is poised to make a credible run for the nomination, the very same folks who'd love Lieberman as the Republican VP choice are falling on top of each other to anathematize Huckabee (Peter Robinson, one-upping his colleague Lisa Schiffren, is now aping Redneck-speak).

Now, someone could object that I'm too focused on a throwaway line in one piece by Kristol about another subject entirely, but that's just the point: up until the moment when Huckabee's candidacy posed a threat to the GOP establishment, the GOP establishment was happy to throw a rhetorical bone to the snake-handling crowd now and then, comfortable in the knowledge that they'd never have to lend any other form of support.

The furious anger the NR, WS, etc. crowd is pumping out at Huckabee is breathtaking in its naivete: they really seem to have thought that they could win by dangling shiny objects in front of the yahoos (gay marriage bans, anti-abortion amendments) indefinitely. Gentlemen and ladies, putting massive military and police bureaucracies, nuclear weapons, and the welfare state under the control of theocratic ignoramuses turns out to be a really, really bad idea, doesn't it? Well, don't blame yourselves, it's not as if you could or should have foreseen the consequences of excusing, empowering, and mobilizing politicized Christian evangelism.