| Shortly after Huckabee walked into a house party in Loudon, New Hampshire he was birddogged.
Birddogging, for those not familiar with primary culture, is where advocacy groups show up at candidate events and ask candidates specific scripted questions designed to get a yes or no answer. The idea is to get beyond rhetoric to an actual commitment.
Here the birddoggers were from St. Michael's representing the Student Global Aids Campaign. They started out with a very specific question - would Huckabee commit to helping the UN reach it's goal of 50 billion in AIDS funding by 2015?
Huckabee dodged that with the standard answer of needing to look over the budget, and having to be fiscally responsible. A second student chimed in, getting to the heart of the matter - would Huckabee's religious views get in the way of him supporting the methods of prevention that such money would support?
What followed was as good an exhibition of house party jujitsu as I have ever seen:
I was stunned. Here was the "compassionate conservative" reborn! Take a public health issue, and discuss it in religious terms - but replace the term "belief" with "respect". Make it about "choices". Take areas where there is a clear moral consensus (drunk driving, domestic abuse) and tie the issue to those. And most important of all - you aren't attacking people with different beliefs - you just don't feel we should encourage behavior associated with those beliefs.
Of course, scrape off the veneer and you see the catalog of fallacies underneath:
* Huckabee quickly veers towards discussing safe sex as if all people having safe sex are infected with AIDS, and therefore reckless.
* He notes the state doesn't encourage people to drive "less drunk" -- but in fact it does. Public policy recognizes insisting on a BAC of zero for drivers is unrealistic. Compromises like this are in fact the core of public policy.
* In his comparison of safe sex to encouraging a wife beater to hit a little "less hard" he engages is a telling category mistake. Spousal abuse is considered wrong by a overwhelming moral consensus which the state enforces against under penalty of law, whereas extramarital and premarital sex is....
Oh, wow. Yikes.
Here's the thing though... as I type this all out, the fringe nature of it becomes obvious. But in Huckabee's presence it's not. There is this air of reasonableness which flows off of him. He's a year 2000 George Bush with 40 additional IQ points and without that damn smirk. Even that doesn't hit it -- Huckabee is as talented on the stump as any of the candidates, Democratic or Republican.
The other Republican candidates could learn something from Huckabee - for if they could get past the anger-lust of the base there is a brass ring to be had by the person that can capture that original Rove vision of religion meshed with politics and sold through the language of compassion. Of course, it was Rove himself that abandoned that approach in 2002 - seeing the thin margin he moved to a base mobilization strategy based on the rhetoric of explicit hate and fear, poisoning the well that Huckabee is now trying to draw water from.
The irony, standing here and watching Huckabee deflect these blows, is that the Republicans best hope of success is to return to that original formulation: Hillary v. Huckabee is a threat to a Democratic victory in a way that Hillary v. Guiliani is frankly not. Were the Republican base to get past its craving for 2002, when hate was in vogue, they'd see that their best chance for an election win is to rerun the formula of 2000 with a sharper and more experienced candidate.
Here in New Hampshire, we'll be watching support for Huckabee very closely to see if they are getting that hint. |
