I Still Like Mike

"That's not the agenda of the Reagan coalition, that's the agenda of the Democratic Party."

So roared Fred Thompson at Mike Huckabee during a televised debate last year.

Huckabee is criminally wrong about the Palestinians, and the expression of such views by a mainstream figure is but one more nail in the coffin of the GOP. But he is still, as the paleocons rightly so disgusted at his outburst over Palestine should be, 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. 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, however, a former Governor of Arkansas. But that is never mentioned. Funny how Bill Clinton wasn't treated like that.