Flashback: How to fight a Huck

If a lot of Huckabee’s evangelical supporters conclude that the party, in rejecting him, is also rejecting them, then the damage will be lasting.

Which makes the performance of so many of Huckabee’s opponents all the more appalling. Huckabee was never going to win the nomination. He was, to be sure, a threat to some of the other candidates. Once he took off, he was going to have a lock on the votes of many social conservatives — those who are evangelicals and favor their own — but would remain unable to win. That handicapped candidates who were trying to assemble majority coalitions dominated by social conservatives of all religions — and it helped candidates who were relatively socially liberal.

Since Huckabee was not going to win the nomination, the problem he posed for the party as a whole was one of coalition management. The first rule in such a situation is not to attack the man’s supporters: Don’t call them country bumpkins. The second is not to attack him in terms that could be (and often are) applied to his supporters: Don’t call him a country bumpkin, either. The third is not to attack him in hysterical terms. Some of Huckabee’s voters could be persuaded that his ideas on economics and foreign policy were misguided and even dangerous. They were not going to be persuaded that he was a “pro-life liberal” who had hoodwinked them. Too many of Huckabee’s opponents, particularly on the Internet, violated all three rules.

A fourth rule, perhaps a corollary of the second, is not to attack him in terms that the Left regularly uses against all conservatives. Most evangelical conservatives do not want a theocracy but believe that the modern liberal version of the separation of church and state is deeply mistaken. Liberals tend to think any dissent from their preferences in this matter is at least incipiently theocratic. Too many of Huckabee’s conservative critics joined them in that confusion. To critique Huckabee’s approach to religion and politics was entirely reasonable; to adopt the ideas and even the language of secular liberalism was counterproductive. It hardened evangelicals’ support for him.