Today the normally clear-headed K-Lo on the Corner said:
A scary thought this Sunday morning: We’re being distracted by Romney (who would be the choice if he wasn’t the richest guy in the race many of his opponents — including McCain — had an inexplicable bitterness toward for being rich … Romney is outside McCain’s comfort zone), Pawlenty (who would be the choice if we knew he could hold his own against Biden; we don’t), and Lieberman (who would be the case if McCain has an I-can-do-anything messiah complex we say Obama has). The real veep pick is Huckabee, who frequently sounds good and looks like a middle-class guy. Save for the fact Huckabee is pro-life, that would be some signal McCain would be sending to conservatives though …
Huckabee is not my first choice or even my fifth choice, but the tendency to read him out of the conservative movement is a disease infecting otherwise rational minds.
In full blow cases Huckabee Derangement Syndrome leads to an obsession with Huckabee out of proportion to his actual merits or demerits.
The HBS victim refuses to allow Huckabee any slack on any issue. Those suffering from HBS draw the worst conclusions possible from everything Huckabee says. HBS is hard to cure and leads to anti-Huckabee posts that risk alienating part of the conservative base even when Huckabee is under no serious consideration for office.
Members of the Corner (though not K-Lo) were willing to swallow Rudy G or recent converts to conservative ideas such as Romney (K-Lo’s fave). Why not Huckabee? Mike Huckabee was an effective conservative governor. He was not perfect from a conservative perspective, but then neither was Romney as governor or Tim Pawlenty now.
I don’t think Huckabee should be the pick, because (like Biden) he is gaffe prone. He is also too “red state” for this close election where independents must be moved to McCain. I don’t see evidence that he can pick up non-Evangelical votes. McCain has the Huckabee voters, unless he picks a pro-abortion candidate.
However, the tendency of certain Republicans to marginalize Huckabee or paint him as a “non-conservative” is not good pragmatic politics (he is popular with a wing of the party). Here is hoping NRO can cure their case of HBS and keep the party united.
I will support any reasonable conservative pro-life pick . . . and would hope K-Lo could do the same.