A Second Hand Conjecture

McCain wears Salvatore Ferragamo? Cindy’s doing no doubt. The poster adds contemptuously: “But that’s what regular guys do right?” This might be the first time footwear symbolism was injected into a presidential campaign since, you know.

Come to think of it, while Democrats are typically obsessed with socioeconomic class in general, there might be a recurring fascination with the class meaning of footwear in particular. Not long ago I saw this bizarre love affair with the higher class metaphors of marks on Tom Udall’s boots.

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Social conservatives and particularly crypto-socialist social conservatives (or “populists” if you prefer), are inevitably going to be a minority faction within the GOP. But to their great credit they themselves recognize this. The implications of that self-awareness are dire for Huckabee however.

Because their interests and perspectives are in many ways peculiar to themselves within the party, historically they’ve always been sensitive to their permanent political vulnerability. Thereby there is a tendency among social conservative voters to desert their insurgent leaders at the first sign of weaknesses (ala Pat Robertson, 1988). Weaknesses which could conceivably imperil their leveraged influence with the eventual broader party nominee and his regime.

As Mick Stockinger at Uncorrelated points out, these odd men out have smelled weakness on Huckabee and must soon begin their desertion from him to the establishment, in order to preserve influence. That’s because what the social conservatives are staring at now, is the prospect of being rendered completely irrelevant for the first time since perhaps 1976. Having supported the overthrow of the prevailing order in the Republican party by an extremist champion with a radical and unpopular agenda, only to watch him fail to seize control of the party, the coup plotters will soon be looking for ways to make themselves indispensable again.

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The rhetoric is certainly heating up in this race. Just look at this speech from populist John Edwards:

For those of us for whom summer is not a verb, for those of us who didn’t go to fancy boarding schools on the east coast, for those of us who didn’t grow up with a silver spoon, who were lucky to have a spoon — ask those folks and they’ll tell you the economy is not doing well for them,

Oh wait, that was Mike Huckabee. To pile on Lee’s Huck posting, I thought I’d take a look at the other side of what I think is our general dislike of Mike Huckabee. And I don’t mean to speak for others here, but I think we’d agree on this. As others have pointed out, Huckabee has taken some decidedly non-conservative (and non-libertarian) positions. With his support for a federal smoking ban just throwing the 10th amendment and federalism out the window, I really can’t trust him to not do the same for banning abortion, banning same sex marriage, mandating the teaching of evolution and his other positions. With a candidate who believes in federalism, at least I can expect them to not try to nationalize their pet moral issues.

BTW, I think it’s worth voting for Fred Thompson just so we can keep up with France in the First Lady race, international relations depend on it!

(HT: The Corner)

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