More Huckabee

I've been amazed at the level of vitriol expressed by certain wings of the Republican party towards Mike Huckabee. Ron Dreher of the Dallas Morning News has written an extremely interesting editorial on the matter. You can read the article in its entirety here, but I've posted highlights below:

The campaign's purest Huckenfreudian moment so far came on Sunday's Meet the Press, when Mitt Romney protested Mr. Huckabee's calling President Bush's foreign policy "arrogant."

"That's an insult to the president, and Mike Huckabee should apologize to the president," Mr. Romney whined.

Or what? He's going to take away the Huck's GOP pledge pin? Mr. Romney's unctuous response brought to mind Doug Neidermeyer, the Animal House brown-noser vexed by the Delta House rabble.

The pathetic Romney plaint is the mournful cry of a Republican establishment in meltdown. Last week, National Review Online blogger Lisa Schiffren, a Giuliani backer, laid into Mr. Huckabee with a screed pithily summarized by Mr. Douthat as, "Go back to Dogpatch, you stupid hillbilly."

Alas for the GOP and for the old guard religious-right leadership, the view from Dogpatch these days is looking up for the populist Huckabee. Could it be that cultural and religious conservatives are fed up with being treated like useful idiots by the Republican establishment? ...

But this populist revolt is not just about religion. Mr. Huckabee calls himself the candidate of Main Street, taking on a party that has become "a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street." He's a throwback to a kind of conservatism that had a home in the Democratic Party before it embraced the counterculture – and created Reagan Democrats.

In a time of mounting economic anxiety, Mr. Huckabee could do worse than to position himself as an outsider critic of a party that just last week blocked an exceedingly modest tax increase on big oil companies to fund research into alternative fuels. ...