The Postwar Election (With Iraq Receding Obama and Huckabee Have A Chance)

The first obvious feature of a postwar election is that domestic issues matter more. The two candidates who have been surging, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee, have almost no foreign policy experience between them.

But the more comprehensive difference between a wartime election and a postwar election is that there is a shift in values. In wartime, leadership traits like courage, steadfastness and ruthlessness are prized. Voters are willing to vote for candidates they distrust so long as they seem tough and effective (Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani).

In a postwar election things are different. When Wall Street Journal/NBC pollsters asked voters what qualities they were looking for in the next leader, their top three choices were: the ability to work well with leaders of other countries; having strong moral and family values; bringing unity to the country. Those are cooperative qualities, not combative ones. They require good listening skills, openness and the ability to compromise.

...voters are not only exhausted by the war, they are exhausted by the war over the war. On the Democratic side, Obama captured the mood exactly with his Jefferson-Jackson Day speech of a few weeks ago. In that speech, he asked voters to reject fear, partisanship and textbook politics. He asked them to vote instead on the basis of their aspirations for a new era of national unity. As a result, Obama has pulled ahead in Iowa and approached parity in New Hampshire.

The tragedy of the Republican race is that Mitt Romney and Giuliani, who could have offered a new kind of Republicanism, opted to run as conventional Bush-era Republicans. Now Huckabee has emerged as the fresh alternative. Huckabee is socially conservative, but not a partisan culture warrior. He’s a pragmatic gubernatorial Republican, not a rigid creature of the beltway interest groups.

David Brooks In Washington, the National Intelligence Estimate was released, suggesting the next president will not face an imminent nuclear showdown with Iran. In Iraq, the surge and tribal revolts produce increasing stability. In Pakistan, the streets have not exploded. In the Middle East, the Arabs and Palestinians stumble toward some sort of peace process. In Venezuela, a referendum set President Hugo Chávez back on his heels. - It has been a good couple of months - hope we have a continuation and a very Merry Christmas and New Year also.

Times are a changing. Or are they?

Nope. The current crop of candidates is just more of the same. We've only had two presidents in the past century that broke molds and moved political lines, FDR and Reagan. Whoever is elected in 2008 will just be a fiddler with the exact placement of political lines drawn by his betters.

The political rancor will continue because the battle is a worldview-type battle--a zero-sum game. If the left wins, the right loses and vice versa. On a vast range of issues, there is no middle ground. If America wins in Iraq, the left loses, both politically and in terms of their desired result. Period. If homosexuality and sexual promiscuity is taught in public schools, families lose their ability to pass their culture along to their children. The same if child protective services keep expanding their jurisdiction. If hate-crimes laws keep getting passed, Christians lose their ability to speak in public without going to jail. If the left is allowed to make another voting underclass out of illegal immigrants, they will never lose another national election. I could go on and on . . .

This is fundamental stuff. I wish the rancor would go away. But only on my terms--that is, the defeat of the left. They feel the same. There is no middle ground where everyone wins something because, ultimately, we are talking about what basic assumptions our culture will live by. The left decided to turn everything on its head in the 1930's. Their movement mainstreamed in the 1960's. Since then, it's been nothing but rancor. That will continue until the last leftist leaves office or conservatives bow to the jackboot.

While I am not a Huckabee supporter, I do think the NYT and liberals in general, are anticipating Governor Huckabee is some sort of knuckle dragging Neanderthal that will quickly fall to their superior liberal dogma.

This man has won in a state which has many Democrats. He knows his job as governor and pastor. He will not be road kill from a liberal juggernaut. In the remote circumstance Huckabee wins the primary the RATS are going to run against a caricature of Huckabee not Huckabee himself.

It would be an exciting election they would lose.

In the remote circumstance Huckabee wins the primary the RATS are going to run against a caricature of Huckabee not Huckabee himself.

It would be an exciting election they would lose.

I don't see how Huckabee appeals to small 'l' libertarians. Huckabee endorses a tobacco prohibition. Giuliani's authoritarian style also doesn't appeal to that block of voters, variously estimated at 10 - 15 percent of the electorate. I think we're screwed if it is either Huckabee or Giuliani in November.

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