Situation Normal: All [Deleted] Up

I speak, of course, of the presidential primary campaigns. Last night when the returns from SC came in, I thought this would surely be the end of the road for my man Huckabee. If he can't win outright in SC, where can he win now? My feeling was that he should go to bed imagining how "McCain-Huckabee '08" would look on a yard sign.

Today, though, having read a lot of the blog commentary by smart people, I'm not so sure.

Larison has an intriguing line on the results, saying that by failing to rally around Huckabee, SC conservatives have empowered the Republican (McCain) who is most associated with offering amnesty to illegal aliens:

Unwilling to tolerate the one who was probably the least objectionable, the GOP may have saddled itself with someone large numbers of Republicans will not be able to stand and who still supports amnesty in spite of everything. The Bob Dole campaign mark II is getting ready for launch.

Furthermore, in another post, Larison -- no Huckabite he -- is taking a second look at Huckabee, judging that he's probably going to end up the most conservative candidate of the GOP field's leaders (which, to Larison, says more about the dreadful GOP today than it does about Huckabee's putative conservatism). See here:

On the other hand, several different surveys of Republican voter opinion show something entirely different from the conservative elite judgement of the man: 63% of Republicans assert that he “shares their values,” compared to just 48% who say the same of Mitt Romney, the candidate National Reviewdeclared to be a “full-spectrum conservative.” In the other poll, 64% identified Huckabee as conservative and 25% see him as very conservative, making him the most right-leaning Republican candidate among the top four in this survey. It would be easy to explain away the disparity between the majority of Republican voters, who likewise continue to identify President Bush as a conservative in similar numbers, and the elite of both movement and party as a function of a combination of voter ignorance, favorable media coverage and the impression left by media coverage that Huckabee is, if anything, “too far” to the right. Then again, the most remarkable thing about these surveys is that they probably accurately describe Huckabee, at least in comparison with his three main rivals (if we must continue to include Giuliani as a major rival).

Moving right along, I commend to your attention the GOP race prognistications of Patrick Ruffini , who sees the race shaping up as follows:

Despite the different actors and alliances in different states, we are beginning to see the real dividing lines of this campaign. It’s the battle of the moderates (McCain), metro conservatives (Romney), and rural conservatives (Huckabee). Stripped of all other hangers-on (Fred, and increasingly, Rudy), nationwide this divide seems to work out to about 40-40-20, or 35-40-25. Conservatives ought to be winning this battle, but Huckabee’s lock on the rural vote (just 16% of the vote in Charleston County, btw) will prevent any kind of clear two-man race before February 5th. Every day that Huckabee’s nice guy act is allowed to continue is a gift to John McCain — and he knows it.

Mitt Romney is fast becoming the candidate of conservatives in the suburbs and the exurbs. In Michigan, he dominated Oakland and Macomb counties with 46% of the vote in a multi-candidate field. In Nevada, he won most convincingly in Clark County. In Iowa, he did better in Des Moines than elsewhere in the state.

The Romney and McCain coalitions also overlap. They represent two different sides of the establishment coin, with McCain representing an older, mainline establishment — the Republican Party of Gerry Ford, Howard Baker, and Bob Dole — and Romney representing the brasher, post-Reagan establishment that was built on the tax issue and whose alliance with modern-day Huckabee voters allowed them to take control of the party in 1994.

It's interesting to think about how personality-driven this race is. On paper, Romney's the natural consensus candidate. On paper, Huckabee voters ought to be moving toward Romney as their default choice. But aside from the fact that lots of Evangelicals won't vote for a Mormon, there's something about Romney's public persona that rubs lots of people the wrong way. I was having a drink the other night with some friends, and at our table was an Evangelical who is a big Romney supporter, and who knows the candidate personally. We were talking about how Romney can't shake the perception that he's an insincere automaton who'll say anything to get elected. My guy said that the shame of it is that Romney's a truly decent man, with solid moral values through and through. But by now, it's going to be awfully hard for him to overcome the instinctive judgment many Republican primary voters have made about him.

(All of us beer-swilling Bible thumpers at the table, by the way, agreed that if Huck's still in this race by the time we get to the Texas GOP primary in early March, he'll own this state. For what it's worth, I was the only non-Evangelical at the table, and the only Huck supporter.)

There's no reason for Florida voters inclined to go for Huck to abandon him at this point. Anyway, don't hold me to this, but as it stands now, if Huckabee is not on the GOP ticket this fall, it's hard to see bothering to vote in the presidential race. I'm not going to vote Democratic, simply because the nominee is going to be too far to the left (an Obama-Webb ticket would be the most tempting to me). But if Hillary Clinton were on the ticket, I'd be mighty motivated to hold my nose and vote for the GOP nominee, just to prevent a Clinton restoration. I know Andrew Sullivan's swooning over Obama, but still, when you read things like this and this on his blog, it suddenly all comes back, what kind of people the Clintons are, and why a Bill Clinton third term would bring out the worst in both the Democrats and the Republicans. Spare us, O Lord.

Final thought: the Republican nominee will be either Mitt Romney, John McCain or Mike Huckabee. No matter which one wins the prize, a significant portion of the GOP base is going to decide to go fishing on election day. I can't see any of these men unifying a party as badly fractured as this one is this year.