The Sunday talkers

We didn't make it to church this morning. The kids are still sick, and Julie and I don't feel so hot ourselves, with our post-Nativity colds. But our liturgical hiatus did afford me a chance to do what I almost never get to do: watch the Sunday talk shows, which naturally today were full of Iowa talk.

Last week, noting that Huckabee was going to be on Meet the Press on the last Sunday before the Iowa caucuses, NR's Rich Lowry said Huck was brave. I'll say. Russert stuck it to him hard today, and his questions highlighted everything that bothers many folks about Huck, especially his relative unpreparedness on foreign affairs and his religiosity. It was by no means a bad performance by the governor, but I don't think anyone hesitating about caucusing for Huckabee had their anxieties alleviated by his answers. Watching his interview, I kept having the nagging feeling -- emphasis on feeling; I haven't concluded this -- that he's not quite ready for the White House, but that in 2012, barring a GOP incumbent running for re-election, he's going to be a mighty contender, in large part because he will have had four more years of studying, thinking and leading his faction in the GOP in the national spotlight.

Anyway, Mitt Romney's negative anti-Huck ads have taken their toll: one new poll shows Romney having pulled slightly ahead of him in Iowa. Other polls show it neck-and-neck, but it's indisputable that Huck peaked too early, and that Romney's negative onslaught has made the Iowa race competitive again. It almost goes without saying that Huck's got to win Iowa. He's not going to win, place or show in New Hampshire, and having failed to tally a win in either state could be devastating to a campaign that depends as heavily as his does on unpaid media.

As I keep saying, I really like both Huck and Ron Paul for several reasons, but probably none more than the changes they're forcing on the GOP. Huck campaign strategist Ed Rollins, whose been around the Republican block a few times, said in today's Times:

“It’s gone,” said Ed Rollins, who once worked as President Reagan’s political director and recently became Mr. Huckabee’s national campaign chairman. “The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition — social conservatives, defense conservatives, antitax conservatives — it doesn’t mean a whole lot to people anymore.”

“It is a time for a whole new coalition — that is the key,” he said, adding that some part of the original triad might “go by the wayside.”

On This Week this ayem, David Brooks underscored that point by saying, if memory serves, that the only excitement on the Republican side in this year's contest has been with Huckabee's populism and McCain's resurgence. Both these men are outsiders disdained by the Republican establishment (I don't know why Brooks didn't include Ron Paul, whose candidacy has obviously caused lots of enthusiasm; probably because that enthusiasm hasn't been translated into significant poll numbers, which indicates that the Paul phenomenon is not one primarily emerging from GOP primary voters). George F. Will harrumphed about how anti-Reaganite Huckabee is on fiscal issues, but Brooks, who has a more sure grasp on changing American political values than does the professorial Will, rejoindered that Romney is speaking to Protestant Republicans making over $100,000 a year; Huckabee is speaking to conservative voters making $60,000 a year or less, and who are anxious about their economic and social prospects (Brooks pointed out that the wealthy aren't suffering from social and familial stress like the middle income and working classes are).

I think it's true, as Will (I believe) said, that Romney is the only GOP candidate representing the old Reagan coalition of social conservatives, defense hawks, supply-siders and small-government libertarians. But there just aren't enough people left on the Right who are willing to accept that bargain anymore. Reagan is dead, and Romney represents the last gasp of classical Reaganism. If defense hawkishness is your thing, McCain's your man. If small government animates you, go Ron Paul. Social conservatives have Huckabee. If "Islamofascism" burns bright in your mind, Giuliani's your torch bearer. Romney tries to be all things to all people, and in a fragmented field that might be enough to win him the nomination. But he conspicuously lacks authenticity, and would stand to win only up against the most calculating and unlikable Democrat imaginable, Hillary Clinton. Romney is the purest expression of establishment Republicanism on the current scene, which to me is all the more reason to cheer for Huckabee, Paul, and even McCain.

Along those lines, three cheers for Daniel Larison's post slamming the High Broderism of East Coast conservative opinion elites, who deign to declare certain candidates too extreme to be a reasonable choice for the presidency, based on ... what, exactly? Here's Larison:

In this view, “extremism” is that which threatens the establishment’s hold on political power and which proposes to challenge or dismantle levers of power that the establishment of both parties wishes to preserve. Among the bugbears of such “centrists” are chiefly populists, the religious and the vehemently antiwar. In the last few weeks, we have seen the Broders of the right getting very anxious about disgruntled religious conservatives and evangelicals and disgruntled lower-middle class voters who are propelling Huckabee’s campaign forward. Over the past several years, we have become only too familiar with the “Very Serious” foreign policy establishment that dismisses the majority’s desire to end the Iraq war in the very near term. Now we are being told once again that the elite is reasonable and all those citizens who are at odds with it are not, just as the rationality and decency of the latter were denied by the leaders of the political class during the immigration debate.

The really interesting question that we won't begin to be able to answer until after the 2008 election is: what part of the old Reagan coalition will be cast out, as Rollins predicts, from what's left of the Republican Party? I'm thinking that even if Huckabee loses the nomination, he's going to be the long-term winner, because he's going to emerge out of 2008 as a national conservative leader with a committed constituency within the GOP and conservative movement. If the Democrats were less interested in cultural issues -- abortion, gay stuff, race matters -- and more committed to bread-and-butter economic issues, they could peel away a lot of the people who like Huckabee now. But I don't see that happening. My guess is that socially liberal business Republican types are most likely to bolt the party for the Dems, especially if 2008 brings a Clinton restoration. But really, there's just no telling at this point.