Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's decisive win in the Iowa Republican caucuses had barely been announced before stalwarts of the GOP establishment began pooh-poohing its significance: Huckabee can never win the nomination. He's our Howard Dean. He's the flavor of the month. He will make even more gaffes and then implode, etc.
This may be true. But given that Huckabee is the strong favorite of the religious and social conservatives who are the single biggest faction of Republican voters – and that polls in Southern states show him surging – it may also be wishful thinking on the part of a party establishment that regards Huckabee with horror.
The establishment has itself to blame. Ever since the cultural tumult of the 1960s, Republicans have systematically sought to depict themselves as forces for family values at war with permissive, irresponsible Democrats. In the South especially, this effort has had an overt religious tinge.
Politically speaking, the results have been spectacular. Only one Democrat, Jimmy Carter, has won a majority of the presidential popular vote in 44 years, and he got just 50.1 percent. The South is now largely Republican. And in 2004, GOP strategist Karl Rove drove turnout to a new level with the targeted recruiting of millions of social and religious conservatives who didn't vote in 2000.
Now this strategy has produced a party in which the arguable front-runner for the presidential nomination isn't just someone who talks the family values talk but is an actual Baptist minister who rejects evolution, baits Mormons and says things like we need to “take this nation back for Christ.” This minister also is a candidate with as much claim to being a fiscal conservative as Rudy Giuliani has to being a social conservative.
What this portends is an all-out fight for the GOP's soul between religious conservatives, small-government believers and defense hawks – and in a year in which Republican prospects already appeared dim. There's a fire inside the GOP's big tent. It's going to be difficult to smother.
