Ace says not to nominate another liberal“compassionate conservative” Republican for president.
And do we really want a man who was completely unaware of some of the biggest foreign policy news of the week?
I really think that a Huckabee nomination would result in some kind of third-party or independent run, by someone.
[Update in the early evening]
But not by Mike Bloomberg. By someone who actually has some sense of libertarian/conservative principles.
In fact, it strikes me that most viable third-party candidates are “centrists” (assuming for the sake of the argument that political positions really are simple enough to put on a one-dimensional left/right scale) who attempt to appeal to the so-called moderates (John Anderson, a liberal Republican in 1980, being a representative example).
In this case the cause for a new entrant wouldn’t be a perception of polarization, but from a sense that there was little choice between the two candidates. I mean, if you’re a Democrat, what’s not to like about Huckabee, other than his position on abortion and guns? I can imagine that in a Clinton/Huckabee race, he might very well pull a lot of the Democrat vote. Most Republicans would vote for him purely out of an antipathy to Hillary!, albeit while holding both nostrils tightly shut. He may, in that sense, be the most electable “Republican.”
The question is, if a true conservative ran, how much would he take from Huckabee? Would it be like Perot (who wasn’t really a conservative–he didn’t have any coherent beliefs whatsoever), who took enough votes from Bush to give the election to Clinton? Or would a charismatic conservative candidate manage to get a majority, and split the Dems between the two liberal candidates?
I don’t know, but this promises to be one of the most interesting (and probably depressing, for a classical liberal) elections in my lifetime. My guess is that Huckabee won’t get the nomination, for many reasons, like the ones that started off this post.