The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison responds to my earlier post on the ‘Party of Huckabee’ here. As always with Larison, the whole thing is well worth a read, but even if I may not agree with everything he has to say in his post, this section is spot-on:
…the things that make Romney more attractive to non-evangelicals in the GOP also force him to spend more time trying to prove that evangelicals and social conservatives can accept him. Aside from the complication that his religion introduces into this, this means that Romney has to emphasize social issues, on which he has no credibility, and public professions of religious faith, which are some of the things that so many Republicans and independents find viscerally unappealing about what they perceive to be the norm in Republican politics.
I think this is right. I think a lot of his frankly repellant flip flopping and pandering is due to being stuck between a rock and a hard place with the current party. That said I’m not sure who would do better. I have a hard time thinking either Palin or Huckabee have a chance. Their negatives are too strong. But Romney is, in some ways, so weak that even a moderately strong contender could beat him. Whether Pawlenty is that man I don’t know. We’ll see.
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This is going to be a problem for any Republican candidate. No matter how strong he (or she) happens to be on fiscal and foreign policy, the stone evangelicals aren’t going to vote for anyone who doesn’t pander to them on the social issues. And any Republican candidate who does that is going to turn off Independents and a fair number of secular Republicans. Plus, as someone pointed out on another thread, this whole creationism issue is a convenient club with which to beat over the head any Republican/conservative in a debate or interview. Whether the stone evangelicals are great enough in number to hand the 2012 election to Obama, I don’t know. Rock and a hard place, indeed.