Nation-Building

At myDD, there's a post about the true dark horse on the GOP side , Mike Huckabee. The bottom line on him is that he has a reserve os support and money that belies his "third tier" status and, in the words of Mike Caulfield , There is this air of reasonableness which flows off of him. He's a year 2000 George Bush with 40 additional IQ points and without that damn smirk. Even that doesn't hit it -- Huckabee is as talented on the stump as any of the candidates, Democratic or Republican. [...] Hillary v. Huckabee is a threat to a Democratic victory in a way that Hillary v. Guiliani is frankly not. Were the Republican base to get past its craving for 2002, when hate was in vogue, they'd see that their best chance for an election win is to rerun the formula of 2000 with a sharper and more experienced candidate. Well, today Huckabee just got a major boost, since Brownback just announced he is out : Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback will drop his White House bid in an announ...

I've had my disagreements with Leon at Redstate, but he's a genuine and principled man. His record on Harriet Miers alone should suffice to prove he was no partisan hack for hackery's sake. And his announcement that he'll be working for Brownback strikes a familiar chord: Whenever I talk to people about Brownback, the consensus response I get is, “I like him probably better than all the rest of the candidates, but he can’t win.” It’s sentiments like this that ignore the greatest, but often forgotten, reality of politics: the surest way to not win a general election is to pick a candidate based upon electability. Besides which, the number of people I hear this sentiment from indicates that Brownback may actually have a better shot than people believe, if people can be convinced to vote for the man they truly believe is right for the job. Reminds me of a candidate I once supported named Howard...