The rise of Mike Huckabee in the polls has certainly roiled the Republican presidential race, and it has conservatives really thinking. Check out The Corner on National Review Online--for the past several days it's been filled with Huck-related stuff. The majority on NRO are opposed to Huckabee. It's got some pro-Huck conservatives fearing NR has gone anti-evangelical. Today, the focus has been on rebutting this--here's a good example: "I am probably one of Huckabee's more strident critics here on the Corner, but let me stress that it is not because he is an evangelical, nor is it because I support another candidate (Fred Thompson). I happily support evangelical candidates (or candidates of whatever religion) who espouse sound policy views.
My inital complaint about Huckabee was that there was nothing particularly conservative about him other than his views on a handful of social issues (and even here his views were not particularly consistent). Neither his record nor his rhetoric suggested that he believed in limited government, economic liberty, federalism or personal responsibility. The more I looked, the more I found that was unnerving, from his indefensible call for an AIDS quarantine to his excessively forgiving approach to clemencies to his juevenile views of foreign policy. That he has a hard time acknowledging errors or changes in his views — as in his ridiculous claim that the "isolation" of AIDS victims is not a quarantine or his dissembling over the Wayne Dumond case — further soured me on him, and had even made me doubt the depth of his convictions. While he is a very effective politician, the sheer number of alleged ethical improprieties combined with the above makes we wonder whether he is as authentic as he appears."
