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As Ariana Huffington observes this week, mainstream conservatives are growing increasingly concerned at Mike Huckabee's surge in Republican primary polls and the prospect that he might actually win the Republican nomination. Not only are they concerned that a Huckabee nomination would virtually guarantee a Democratic victory in the 2008 general election, as recent poll numbers suggest; some also decry what is looking increasingly like a takeover of the Republican Party by religious zealots bent on using the power of the federal government to turn the United States into a theocracy. Prominent among Huckabee's Republican critics is Charles Krauthammer, who as Huffington observes had no problem with religious zealots back when they were simply showing up for the GOP on Election Day and then going home and keeping their mouths shut. Now Krauthammer complains that the 2008 campaign is "knee-deep in religion." As Kevin Drum observes, the theocratic use of state power favored by Huckabee and other religious conservatives flies rather in the face of the libertarian, small-government philosophy that helped propel the GOP to power in 1980 and 1994 and was certainly to thank for winning moderates and former Democrats to the Republican cause. Like Huffington, Andrew Sullivan observes this as a problem these same mainstream conservatives brought on themselves: "It is certainly too late for fellow-traveling Christianists like Lowry and Krauthammer to start whining now. This is their party. And they asked for every last bit of it."
Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com
