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 Chris Keane/Reuters |
 2008
The Horror of Huck
We have seen this act in the Republican party before – recently
JONAH GOLDBERG
One of my favorite movie scenes is from Jaws 2, when Roy Scheider (an underrated actor) is trying to convince the town council that he’s spotted yet another shark lurking off the waters of Amity. “But I’m telling you, and I’m telling everybody at this table, that that’s a shark. And I know what a shark looks like, because I’ve seen one up close. And you’d better do something about this one, because I don’t intend to go through that hell again!”
If you’re wondering why some of us have become so vexed by the sightings of Mike Huckabee’s dorsal fin above the choppy waters of Iowa-caucus polling and even out in the high sea of national polls, poor Chief Brody’s panic might help you understand. We’ve seen this before.
Now, some “Huckabashers” have an interest in slapping down Huckabee because he’s a threat to their preferred candidates. But for many of us, Huckaphobia is sincere and disinterested. We feel a bit like Lloyd Bochner’s assistant in that Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” — the one where Bochner walks into an interstellar stewpot while carrying an alien tome because he doesn’t hear his assistant shouting, “It’s a cookbook!” Now we’re shouting, “It’s a compassionate conservative!” — and wondering if voters will hear us in time.
I should probably capitalize those words, because I have no problem — nor can I imagine anyone who does — with a conservative’s feeling compassion for the unfortunate, the injured, the infirm, the victimized, the lost puppies, and the birds with broken wings. No, I’m talking about big-“C” Compassionate Conservatism, which in some parts also goes by the name “heroic conservatism.”
Let’s backtrack. In 2000, George W. Bush ran as a “different kind of Republican.” He was a compassionate conservative. The obvious implication was that those who disagreed with him were the sort to finish every debate on social policy by asking: “Why? Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” (which, let the record show, are often good questions). Compassionate conservatism played well in Iowa, though that may simply have followed from the fact that Bush played well in Iowa.
The voters in New Hampshire, however, felt differently. As Rich Lowry noted at the time, Bush’s compassionate-conservative rhetoric sounded Clintonian to the tougher conservatives of the Granite State. (Clinton himself commented in 1999 that “the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism . . . half those speeches sound like I gave them in ’92. . . . It’s very flattering.”) “The toughest job in the world is to be a single mom,” Bush proclaimed on the stump, to crowds stumped by what the policy implications of that observation might be. He promised he’d leave no child behind, a phrase employed relentlessly by Clintonites in the 1990s. McCain talked about beating Al Gore like a drum; George Bush promised to be a uniter, not a divider. New Hampshire voters united around the divider, giving McCain a 19-point victory margin. Bush responded in South Carolina by dropping the “I feel your pain” shtick and going on offense against McCain (to say the least). “New Hampshire,” Lowry wrote in these pages in April 2000, “was compassionate conservatism’s Waterloo.”
Would that it had been so. Compassionate conservatism came back with a roar, or at least a very loud purr, in the general election. At the GOP convention, Bush and Rove hid the pale, male, shrink-the-government Huns from primetime and dressed the stage with a gorgeous mosaic of ethnic minorities. Bush insisted — as if lots of people disagreed — that family values do not end at the Rio Grande. But in his case, this justified trying to open the floodgates to even more Mexican immigrants.
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