Huckabee is the only GOP candidate anybody can seem to muster much passion over right now. James Poulos -- who is always a smart read, even if he didn't invite me to his Christmas cocktail party and make me a Manhattan -- explains here the really interesting Rieffian reasons he doesn't like Huckabee. Nevertheless, he gets all up in George Will's whalebone corset over Will's snide dismissal of Huckabee's populism as groundless, given how wages have been rising for everyone. Poulos says the defenders of the economic status quo -- that's you, Prof. Dr. Will -- won't recognize that it's eroding the same moral and social virtues that conservatives say they want to defend. Here's Poulos:
Some populists want to concentrate public power in Washington; some want to smash the private interests that flatter it there in an open conspiracy of irresponsibility and infidelity. Whatever you think about the wisdom or justice of that latter course of action, you’ve got to recognize that rising wages tell us almost nothing about our economic health. Indeed, obscuring that fact permits us a great round of self-flattery — with so many getting richer, and wealth an unquestionable sign of personal responsibility, we need open no discussion about the sicknesses and chronic failures that have afflicted our culture and our politics. For all Huckabee’s faults, he recognizes much of how and why we should break the hold of our group grope on that collective lie.
Again, though I like Huckabee more than R.A. Fox does, I'm his fan mostly because of the interesting things he's forcing to happen, and will force to happen, in conservative politics. But I think it's time for me to recognize that I'm probably never going to have a presidential candidate I can fully believe in. If such a person were to exist, he wouldn't be running for president, but pushing a Lucky Dog cart in the French Quarter.
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"Huckabee is the only GOP candidate anybody can seem to muster much passion over right now."
What?!
Reading the paper on Sunday, I got a paragraph or so into that Will column and thought "It's about time I informed that vast army that reads my blog that George Will is officially over."
Then I read another paragraph or two and thought "Why bother?" and moved on to something else.
Granted, the whole question of middle class prosperity is complex and hardly a simple oppression-of-the-masses story. But I didn't see any indication that Will is even interested in exploring it.
I was a passionate Will reader and believer all through high school, and my first years of college. Then, sometime after the Persian Gulf war broke out, I read one of his Newsweek columns, and I thought to myself, "This isn't an exploration of issues and ideas; this a talking point sheet from GOP central." Since that time, he's occasionally said something accurate and wise, but more often than not he's simply proved himself a rather predictable partisan again and again and again. The thinker who gave us Statecraft as Soulcraft--a fine book--departed the building long ago.
What no one seems to have noticed is that while Will disses Huckabee, Edwards, and the Clintons, he concludes by hopping on the Obama bandwagon, despite the fact that on a slew of issues -- global warming, taxes, the judiciary -- Obama is sure to drive him nuts.
Suspect he knows a winner when he sees one.
Reilly-Minkoff '08 - an anti-war North-South, Catholic-Jewish, male-female, conservative-liberal fusion ticket that can capture the rural redneck Calvinist vote.
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