Let The RINOs Roar Their Way Home

Which way should Mike Huckabee's voters go this time? Huckabee's victory in Iowa was a cause of unalloyed joy, because he is really a Democrat.

He is a Democrat who believes in the six-day creation, but there used to be a lot of them, and there probably still are under the surface. (Bush is also a creationist, of course.)

He is also Democrat who opposes abortion, who defends marriage as only ever between one man and one woman, and who upholds Second Amendment rights. But when many or even most Democrats were like that, there were generations of Democratic dominance, making possible exactly the sorts of things that really do mark out Huckabee, incontrovertibly, as a Democrat: creating jobs, relieving poverty, extending and defending workers' rights, that sort of thing.

Since turning into shibboleths abortion, the homosexualist agenda, and the restriction of gun ownership to government functionaries and to criminals, the Democrats have driven away great swathes of exactly the people who made them the party of Main Street rather than Wall Street. That Huckabee ran as a Republican demonstrated this more starkly than anything else yet.

Huckabee also believes that it is not for America to try and export her political institutions around the world. Imagine!

Huckabee is not, by the way, a "former Baptist minister". He is still a Baptist minister, and I for one rather liked the idea that he might nevertheless have occupied the reserved presidential pew in Saint John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square. It would have been rude of them not to invite him to preach occasionally, which would have been nothing if not memorable for all concerned. (He is a "former" Governor of Arkansas, but that is never mentioned. Funny how Bill Clinton wasn't treated like that.)

Anyway, which way should his supporters, and the millions more like them, jump?

Well, they now have the chance to re-elect Congressmen Altmire, Berry, Boren, Costello, Cuellar, Davis, Donnelly, Ellsworth, Holden, Kildee, Lipinski, Marshall, McIntyre, Melancon, Mollohan, Murtha, Oberstar, Ortiz, Peterson, Rahall, Skelton, Shuler, Stupak, Taylor, Wilson, et al while adding to those al figures such as Bobby Bright (AL-02, a Baptist deacon), Parker Griffith (AL-05, a pro-life doctor and endorsed by Alabama's State Fraternal Order of Police), Doug Heckman (GA-07, a special forces colonel in the Army Reserves and endorsed by General Wesley Clark), Mike Montagano (IN-03), David Boswell (KY-02), Don Cazayoux (LA-06), Joseph Larkin (MI-11), Travis Childers (MS-01), Jim Esch (NE-02), Steve Driehaus (OH-01), Bill O'Neill (OH-14) and Kathy Dahlkemper (PA-03).

Meanwhile, the Senate already includes staunch pro-lifers such as Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. It also includes Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, an economically populist opponent of the neoconservative war agenda, and a cultural conservative who served as Navy Secretary in the Reagan Administration. If the filibuster-proof sixty mark is to be reached, then it will need to be reached in such persons as Ronnie Musgrove (MS, who as State Governor signed the law banning public funding of abortion) and Bob Conley (SC, a traditional Catholic, Ron Paul activist, and opponent of the bailout).

The Democratic Epoch is about to begin. Let Huckabee and his ilk inaugurate it in style. And let the Democratic Party know that it is they who have done so.