I’ve got three words for you:
President Mike Huckabee?
I’m glad he added a question mark at the end, otherwise I might’ve thought he’d lost his marbles. At least Kristol is hedging a bit. I tell you it’s gonna be a wild and woolly presidential election campaign. With Bill Kristol shilling for Mike Huckabee, Lord knows where the Republican nomination fight could lead.
So many mistakes it’s hard to know where to begin. First, he predicts Hillary’s candidacy’s demise as a result of the Iowa loss. A lot of people have made the mistake of underestimating the Clintons, Kristol being only one of them. And I say this as someone who doesn’t support her.
Rock bass player as presidential timber (Jim Cole/AP)
Second, and I kid you not, Mike is such an “impressive” campaigner because he’s “just a player in a rock and roll band:”
His campaigning in New Hampshire has been impressive. At a Friday night event at New England College in Henniker, he played bass with a local rock band, Mama Kicks. One secular New Hampshire Republican’s reaction: “Gee, he’s not some kind of crazy Christian. He’s an ordinary American.”
That oughta win him the election right there. Any guy who knows the chords to Mustang Sally and Johnny B. Goode could face down Vladimir Putin in a heartbeat. Does Huckabee even know who Vladimir Putin IS?
Third, the NYT’s new columnist even quotes Michele Malkin, gracing her with the title “conservative writer.” Mr. Neocon has officially promoted her from “blogger” (which is what she is) to “writer.” Does that tell you where this guy is going politically? How often prior to this has that harpy been mentioned in the pages of the Times? Maybe Anne Coulter will be quoted in his next column. It’s enough to make my skin crawl. At least he doesn’t quote Malkin saying anything overtly stupid, insulting or demeaning. But hey, he’s got a lot more columns to write.
I am a tad disappointed Bill didn’t mention as another selling point that Huckabee suggested Chuck Norris as his secretary of defense (“When Huckabee took the microphone, he suggested Norris for secretary of defense, a proposal that was met with wild whoops and cheers”). Even as a joke that’s kinda scary.
Kristol concludes with this warning to Democrats: don’t underestimate Mike:
Some Democrats are licking their chops at the prospect of a Huckabee nomination. They shouldn’t be. For one thing, Michael Bloomberg would be tempted to run in the event of an Obama-Huckabee race — and he would most likely take votes primarily from Obama. But whatever Bloomberg does, the fact is that the Republican establishment spent 2007 underestimating Mike Huckabee. If Huckabee does win the nomination, it would be amusing if Democrats made the same mistake in 2008.
IF Bloomberg runs and IF Huckabee wins the nomination…if Kristol thinks that Bloomberg won’t win HUGE numbers of votes from skeptical Republicans (in addition to votes he might win from moderate-conservative Democrats), he’s seriously deluded.
If Obama wins the nomination and runs a good, aggressive campaign against Huckabee, he could win in a landslide. And if Bush keeps sending the country down the tubes it won’t matter if the Republicans could bring Ronald Reagan back from the dead. No Republican could win.
I wish you had kept this quiet Richard. I’ve heard Rudi’s people (Pipes and Co. aka Count Aipacula) are trying to line up Steven Seagal in case they ever win anything.
Malkin is definitely a writer – remember her infamous book defending the WWII Japanese internment camps? – but I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that she’s actually “conserving”.
More generally, however, most (not all) bloggers do qualify as writers. They may not be professional (salary-earning) writers, and they may not be well-known writers, and yes, they might not be good writers, but they are writers nonetheless.
BTW, it’s “Ann”, not “Anne”, Coulter. If Kristol does mention Coulter, please let us know – as I recall, Coulter once publicly mused that Timothy McVeigh should have blown up the New York Times!
Kristol is a walking intellectual black hole, really nothing to say there.
I have to admit that I find Huckabee entertaining and somewhat likable, not that this is important or relevant Presidential criteria. I could never vote for Huckabee, or any Republican for that matter (except a Ron Paul/HRC contest would be a difficult call and I can imagine my hand floating fleetingly over to the Republican ( ) circle–in the end I’d probably pick a third-party candidate over Hillary), but it’s hard for me to despise Huckabee the way I do Romney, Guiliani and the other neocon crypto-fascists and Wall Street Barons. I’ll take a dose of conservative populism over the Weltanschaung of the George Will’s and Norman Podhoretz’s. Huckabee’s hee-haw religious conservatism and (sometimes) demagoguing is disturbing and a bit scary, but frankly there are scarier things out there. I would even venture that Hillary Clinton’s sober and quite secular acceptance of belligerent American militarism and empire scares me a little more.