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By Jonah Goldberg
Sunday, January 13, 2008; B1
“... And both of these derive from the kind of thinking that led George W. Bush to insist in 2000 that he was a “different kind of Republican” because he was a “compassionate conservative” — a political program that apparently measures compassion by how much money the government spends on education, marriage counseling and the like.
The most revealing development of the campaign so far has to be Huckabee’s success at displacing Thompson as the candidate of the socially conservative South. Thompson’s failure to translate the immense excitement about his pre-candidacy into anything better than also-ran status is largely attributable to a lackluster campaign effort. But there’s at least something symbolic about the fact that Huckabee has become, in the words of Commentary’s John Podhoretz, “the socially conservative Southern pro-life candidate with a silver tongue and a pleasingly low-key affect.”
...Taken at his word, Thompson is a card-carrying Reaganite, favoring low taxes, a strong defense and a shrunken role for the federal government.
Huckabee, meanwhile, is nearly the philosophical opposite. He would even use his power as president to push for a national ban on public smoking. “I’m one of the few Republicans,” Huckabee insists, “who talk very clearly about the environment, health care, infrastructure, energy independence. I don’t cede any of those to the Democrats.”
When Huckabee says that, he means it in the same way that Bush promised not to surrender health care and education (another Huckabee issue) to his opponents when he ran as a “compassionate conservative.” As a result, we got the biggest federal government expansion into education in history and the largest spike in entitlement spending since the Great Society.
Huckabee says he’s a “paradoxical conservative,” and his success so far suggests that this is the wave of the future on the right. McCain, who may be emerging as the “establishment” candidate, proves the point. ...
There are important differences — on national security, the role of government, religion — among the different brands of conservatism bubbling up. But none of them necessarily reflects the views of the pro-government and social conservative rank and file. The center of the right does not hold, and so we see an army with many flags and many generals and nobody knows who goes with which.
In other words, there’s a huge crowd of self-described conservatives standing around the Republican elephant shouting “Do something!” But what they want the poor beast to do is very unclear. And it doesn’t take an expert in pachyderm psychology to know that if a big enough mob shouts at an elephant long enough, the most likely result will be a mindless stampede — in this case, either to general election defeat or to disastrously unconservative policies, or both. ...”