Why does the GOP Establishment fear Huck?

Juan Cole's got a bad case of left-wing Huckenfreude:

I simply can not tell you how much I am enjoying this. The GOP has been pandering to these stupid bastards for years, and every time I pointed it out I was called “anti-Christian” or something or other. Those of us who saw what the party was becoming were told to shut up, that it was good politics.

Enjoy your new GOP, folks. And here is something else to think about- are the evangelicals going to support Romney or Giuliani if you do manage to trash Huckabee enough to secure the nomination for them? Will the eye for an eye crowd learn to forgive and forget? Have fun!

But that's not why the GOP Establishment is panicking. They're panicking because a) Huckabee is a wild card who could lose massively in the general election; b) Huckabee doesn't owe any of them anything; and c) Huckabee's rise shows how badly, perhaps irretrievably, the fusionist settlement (uniting social and economic conservatives) has broken down, leaving the GOP in a shambles.

It's funny, but when it looked like Rudy Giuliani, a social liberal, was going to be the nominee, we didn't see many, if any, establishment Republican opinion leaders freaking out over what kind of danger to the future of the party and the nation he represented, even though as Ross points out, Giuliani hasn't exactly been deep on policy (I had to research Giuliani for our Dallas Morning News editorial board debate on which candidate to endorse, and I was genuinely startled by how vague he was on many things). I think it's fair to say that it was assumed that Giuliani would be a sound representative of the Republican Party, and that the social and religious conservatives would do like they always do and get in line. Pat Robertson sure did.

But lo, it turns out that the candidate who's caught fire comes straight out of the religious/social conservative wing of the coalition, and he is unsound on issues most important to the fiscal wing. It's not supposed to work that way. Nobody at the elite level seems to expect the economic conservatives to suck it up for the sake of party unity. What does that say about the place of social conservatives in the party all these years?

I don't want to overdo this. I think it's perfectly fine to be worried about Huckabee's vagueness, and his unpreparedness. I'm worried about these things too, which is a big reason why I can't say I'd vote for him (though honestly, any Republican who finds himself worked up over Huckabee's lack of knowledge about foreign affairs, say, should ask himself if he felt the same way about Gov. Bush in 1999 and 2000, and if not, why not). Still, it's hard to shake the belief that the real problem with Mike Huckabee, as far as the establishment is concerned, is that he's not clubbable.

Reader Conor writes on this topic:

I really don't think it is because he is a Christian Evangelical who believes to the core of his person. I don't think it is because he is a Christian Evangelical through and through and is the equivalent of Pat Robertson winning. I think it is that he is a populist and he is a hell of a better politician than any of the other folks at the top of the tier. Sure Huckabee is trying to squeeze the Evangelicals for all they are worth, but there is more to him than that. I really think this is the piece that too many are missing by focusing in on the fact that he is a Baptist minister, Christian Leader, etc.