"Empty vessels for others' hopes"

For me, the Huck-as-change-agent theme comes down to this: an America led by a President Huckabee, and a conservative movement whose leader he is, might be an America and a conservatism where more people will read Wendell Berry -- and for that matter, Catholic social thought. Who knows where that might lead? I'll tell you this: some place better than is offered by Huckabee's Republican opponents.

Excellently said, Rod. I, frankly, don't think we're going to get to that point, partly because I don't think any Republican candidate could win the presidency this year, and partly because I fear that Romney, et al, are going to use their money and count on the fear tactics of George Will and his crowd to drive the GOP rank-and-file away from Huckabee, even assuming he does well enough between now and Super Tuesday. But you know what? Even if all that comes to pass--and while I think it will, I still kind of hope it won't--a GOP wherein a guy like Mike Huckabee (a fake populist, to be sure, but someone who is at least honestly trying to fake it, nonetheless) can manage to spend a month mixing evangelical Christianity with social concerns about energy, education, and health care, and manage to lead in the polls (or at least come close to leading) while doing so, is a GOP in far, far better shape than any one we've seen in the past two decades. Wendell Berry? Catholic social thought? If Huckabee's shtick can help get even just a handful of Republicans to recognize that these are in truth conservative sources of ideas, we'll owe the man big time.

Oh, and I like what you say about Obama very much. I don't dislike him in anyway, but the expressivism and hope tied up with his candidacy operates at even a murkier level than I prefer to deal with; with Huckabee it's a least a question of what his ideas and approaches can mean in the long run, but with Obama it's his identity--the very fact of a post-civil-rights-mindset black man running for president!--which is seen as the carrier of meaning. Now, moving us away from the same-old-same-old regarding race would be no small achievement, but it's Obama the Man who could do it, and do it without in all likelihood changing a bit of his very conventional liberal Democratic worldview.

One caution I would make to the far more learned commentators above me:

If Democrats really wanted throw-the-bums-out radical change in a **political** sense rather than a **social** sense, they would vote for Edwards. (As indeed, more did in Iowa than for Hillary Clinton's Dukakisesque "competence, not ideology" message.)

Of course Obama is not the ideal "vehicle" -- no politician is. But hope, once stirred (and it rarely is, so he does have a gift of some sort -- the RFK gift, as that noted ultraliberal Bob Novak just said), can be a powerful force in politics -- and society.

If Obama is so different from his fellow "community activist" Al Sharpton, why did he and his wife spend the better part of December paying fealty to the rotund rev in hopse of getting his endorsement? Heck, even after Sharpton's National Action Network tax scam organization became the subject of a federal grand jury investigation,the Obamas kept pursuiing Sharpton.

Meet the new agent for change/community activist, same as the old agent for change/community activist.

The Man From K Street writes:
he chose to be...a discrimination attorney

One doesn't need to be a "standard affirmative-action liberal" to believe that discrimination exists and should be fought.

I think Obama diverges quite a bit from the standard. He has stated that he doesn't think his daughters, given their privileged household, should benefit from affirmative action.

If I were giving Hillary Clinton advice on how to go up against the Obama movement, I would suggest she get as specific as possible about her positions and what she will do as President in order to push Obama to do the same.

Yes, I realize this would give her a little less wiggle room if she is elected and might cost some votes, but it might be the most effective way to the nomination. Oh, yeah, and stop having Bill introduce her -- he should be behind the scenes, not in front of the cameras.

Jillian-

What party had a KKK Keagle as their majority leader as recently as the 1990s in Bobby Byrd? What party opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964? And such opponents included Seantors Al Gore Sr. and William Fulbright, Clintons' mentor.

Yes, the GOP has not looked kindly upon affirmative action and busing. It has coopted working class whie people and Southern whites when the Democrat party choose to embrace liberal court-driven policies which discrminated against them to try to address these apst wrongs. But it might do you a bit of good to crack a history book once in a while, possibly look up what party Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt called home. And may be consider what some of the "enlightened" Dem president like Wilson and Truman thought about their fellow black Americans.

If Obama's support owes much to his skin color, may be that says more about his supporters than their willing to admit. And I'd note as Chris Hitchens does(and does so better than any of us ever could)-why isn't Obama's "Afrocentric Christian" church being discussed at all, while discussions of Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani's religous beliefs are a given(and rightly discussed if we're electing one of thess guys president)?

'In "The Seven Storey Mountain," Thomas Merton wrote that as he was deepening his conversion to Catholicism, he thought he was Catholic enough, because he could argue doctrine all night long. What he didn't understand at the time, he confessed, was that it's far more important that the will be converted than the mind, and for this reason: because while the will can't convince the mind that something that's true is false, it works more subtly than that, directing the conscious mind to ideas and possibilities that wouldn't have occurred to it otherwise. In politics, what this means is that when you elect a president, you are electing not only a set of policy preferences, but a worldview, and that worldview will inevitably open up some doors and close others. And this matters.'

Thanks for that! That paragraph made me sit up and pay attention. We tend to lose sight of the importance of a particular worldview and set of priorities in our haste to check the blocks on abortion, gay rights, taxes, and terrorism. A politician is far more than the sum of his or her parts, in that regard. Vision counts.

Bugg:

Lest we forget, Christopher Hitchens is against EVERYONE'S religion.

And your analysis fails to explain why 90%+ of African-Americans themselves disagree with you.

K Street:

You're entitled to be cynical about Obama, I guess.

But in ignoring the candidate who is by far the MOST cynical in the Democratic field -- I'd have to call that distortion of the facts, well, cynical.

So because a huge majority of black people don't likethe GOP's stand on AA, therefore, Republicans are ipso facto racists? As above, there's enough blame to go around on both sides. But ti gets us nowhere. Further, you simply ignore facts when they don't conform with your world view. Where's the logic in that?

Hitchens is an avowed atheist; it doess't make his point any less valid, may be quite the contrary since he has no religous dog in the battle of dogmas the candidates follow. Again, you don't answer his fair question-why by the virtue of his skin color is Obama exempt from explaining his denomination's beliefs and it's leader, while GOP candidates have rightly been forced to discuss their beliefs?

I find Romney's supposed tears about God's 1978 revealtion to Mormon elders about race-at the time they were facing the IRS yanking their tax exmept status-one more reason to doubt him. I find Huckabee's beliefs out there, having admittedly virtually no contact with Evangelicals. And while my views on Catholicism differ with Giuliani,I still think the subject is something he should talk about. We're electing a man, not a collection of position papers(or a parrot who screams CHANGE every 10 seconds).