Huckabee-The Chicken That Came Home To Roost

Be careful what you ask for. Beginning in 1948, when then Democratic governor Strom Thurmond bolted the Democratic Party to form the "Dixiecrats" in his run for the Presidency, the Republican Party has been asking for-Democrats. You know, those Democrats who, to paraphrase the famous words of Ronald Reagan, did not leave the party so much as the party left them.

It was a long term and for the most part successful drive, culminating the elections of Nixon, Reagan, and Bushes I and II. To be sure, there were hiccups along the way, with the elections of Carter and Clinton. For the most part, however, these were short term re-defections that didn't amount to a movement so much as a test run, based on the hopes that the Democratic Party finally saw the light in those areas where it mattered the most.

The most obvious non-Presidential successes of the Republican drive for Democratic votes was in the 1994 and 2002 mid-term elections. The Republicans took over both houses of Congress in the first case, and in the second, George Bush became the first incumbent President in more than fifty years whose party won seats in the mid-term. Perhaps most importantly, the Republican Party came to a kind of prominence in the Deep South that two decades and more earlier would have been unimaginable.

Now, the Republican Party is in a tail-spin, and as I have been saying, seems afflicted with multiple personality disorder, where the various fragmented parts of the whole are manifesting in the various personalities that make it up, rach one vying for control of what is actually an entity at war with itself internally.

One of the most important parts of the Republican psyche is the "born again, evangelical" Christians, who make up a large part of those former Democrats who left in disgust the party of the working, common man.

Now, they want payback for the years of loyalty to the party, and they will not, it seems, be denied. Now, they want one of their own. An economically moderate former Baptist minister and Arkansas governor from Hope Arkansas who is actually to a great extent a social liberal and who even to some degree talks like a Democrat on foreign policy issues.

Oh, but he is anti-abortion and believes God has a place in the public arena. Since he believes in these things, and apparently believes in a literalist interpretation of the Bible, that makes him, to the Christian base, one of them, even if he is a moderate on border security issues and favors such things as a nationwide smoking ban.

Establishment Republicans are going crazy. They point out that heraised taxes more than Bill Clinton. Of course, what they don't say (and to a great extent don't realize) is that as a governor of a state, he had no choice. Many if not most states-and this evidently includes Arkansas-do not have the luxury of running up huge deficits. They have budgets they must balance. Therefore, if it is impossible for a Republican governor to rein in spending in a state in which the legislature is controlled by Democrats, tax raises might well be unavoidable.

This doesn't worry me so much as some of the other problems with Huckabee. Still, I have to admit, it's fun watching the Party go berserk over this guy.