Can You Say “Destabilize?”

One. Just one. It only takes a single whack-a-doo head-of-state to destabilize an entire region.

Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad certainly come to mind when whack-a-doo heads-of-state are mentioned. Each has recently done his level best through deeds and words to keep his neighborhood in a state of unease and the threat of war. The Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb of the Asia, both have wormed their way into our hearts with their preferred methods of accomplishing this, involving the insane rhetoric and threat of nuclear weapons, but my current favorite can be found in South America.

Hugo Chavez, el president of Venezuela, has had a political career so marred by inflammatory rhetoric, abuse of power, and unsavory connections that there really isn't an adjective comprehensive enough to accurately describe it. After failing to overthrow by force the (somewhat) democratically elected government of Venezuela in the early 90's, Chavez was later successfully elected to the office of president. Since taking office, Chavez has cultivated "Bolivarian Revolution" in his own country using gangs of armed thugs, rewritten the constitution so that the office of president is neither checked nor balanced, and used his influence (and his country's oil) to assist leftist regimes to acquire and maintain power in Latin America. An avowed socialist, he has cultivated ties to regional socialist ideologues Fidel Castro and FARC, the Colombian rebels/terrorists who fund much of their operations through the illegal drug trade.

Only recently have the Venezuelan people been able to reign in his acquisition of power, when they defeated his latest constitutional changes, which would have allowed him to legally maintain power for an indefinite term. This setback, however, has not slowed down the anti-US and anti-Columbian rhetoric and posturing that have become two of Chavez's many colorful trademarks.* Working hard to ignore his rebuke by the Venezuelan voters, Chavez is moving full speed ahead with his antagonistic foreign policy.

On March 1^st, Colombia destroyed a FARC base several kilometers inside the Ecuadoran border, killing FARC's #2 man, Raul Reyes, but it did so without the prior knowledge or consent of the Ecuadoran government. Partisans pro- and anti-whatever can debate the legality of Colombia's actions or of Ecuador's leftist government providing safe harbor for FARC terrorists. Neither side is blameless, but after a period of intense diplomatic disgruntlement they would have gotten over it without a call to arms.

Hugo "Whack-A-Doo" Chavez, however, has issued a call to arms and is working to make it much harder to get over. Currently, Venezuelan troops are massing at the Colombian border.

Chavez has long admitted to having ties with FARC. He claims to have used these ties to negotiate with FARC to secure the release of several of the estimated 700 hostages taken in pursuit of their terrorist activity. There has long been speculation that he has provided funding and material assistance to FARC in order to help them launch their own "Bolivarian Revolution" in Colombia. Insiders have even detailed "suspicious deals" by PDVSA, Venezuela's government-run oil company, which may have been used to launder money for FARC, a major drug trafficker. Ignoring the estimated 700 hostages, Chavez has campaigned hard to have FARC removed from the list of terrorist organizations.

With the Colombian incursion into Ecuador, Chavez has taken his already vitriolic anti-Columbian rhetoric and (BAM!) "kicked it up a notch." With troops massed at Colombia's borders and sabers rattling, Chavez and his ideological ally Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa are making it much easier for a war to get started. Several "regional experts" have stated that a shooting war in which Ecuador and Venezuela join forces with FARC against Colombia's government is unlikely--and I agree--but what if he reaches the conclusion that the US military is stretched too thin in Iraq and Afghanistan to help Colombia. Could he decide to see if he can get away with overthrowing the Colombian government?**

Meanwhile, the Colombian government has produced for the world press a number of documents purported to have been taken form Raul Reyes' laptop. These documents purport to show Chavez's financial support of FARC and other ties to the group. Venezuela has denounced the documents as fake, but let's reserve judgment until they can be thoroughly analyzed. If true, however, they are fairly damning of Chavez.

*Top 5 Other Colorful Chavez trademarks: #5)Threatening to cut off oil to the US; #4) Nepotism; #3) Nationalizing foreign industries; #2) Verbally bitch-slapping Colombian president Alvaro Uribe; and #1) Shouting "Viva Fidel" at the moment of climax.

**Remember he is a former army colonel and he has already attempted to overthrow one government.

The Week’s Highs and Lows

Forget Hillary's angry condemnation of Obama's mailers, which she claims intentionally distort her positions on the few places where any differences at all can be found in their platforms. Forget Obama's response, which was every bit as calculated as Hillary's anger or the inaccurate mailers that 'caused' it. No, the best and the worst in political America this week had almost nothing to do with Hillary, Obama, McCain, or even Huckabee, who was very amusing on Saturday Night Live.

The week's best could be found down in tiny Prairie View, Texas, where students at Prairie View A & M University, a historically black university, held a protest march. We all know that protest marches have become parodies of themselves, tired attempts to recreate the moral grandeur of the Civil Rights Movement, but this one was different. There was no Jessie Jackson dominating the limited media coverage, no Al Sharpton in his velour tracksuit, fast walking with the protesters and doling out sound bites. Best of all, the organizers of this protest actually found something worthwhile about which to protest.

The Republican-dominated Texas state legislature* has worked hard over the last ten years to use redistricting to give even greater dominance to their party. Gerrymandered districts loop, squiggle, and zig-zag their way across the state, isolating pockets of Democratically-inclined voters and locking them into districts with much larger pockets of voters more inclined to vote Republican. Combine this gerrymandering with more subtle ways of reducing the impact of more liberal voting constituencies, like—in this case—inconvenient polling places for the eight thousand students of Prairie View A & M, and the party currently dominant in the legislature hopes to ensure that their dominance becomes self-perpetuating.

The Prairie View protest march covered the seven miles from the university's campus to the polling place established for early voters in the Texas primaries. It is easy to see why these college students, a large percentage of whom do not possess their own transportation, felt this erected a huge hurdle for early voters from their school to clear before their votes would be allowed to count.** The beauty of the march was the fact that it was lacking in hyperbole: the seven miles marched equalled seven miles to the polling place. The lack of Jacksonian or Sharptonian rhetoric kept the event's focus on the students and their right to cast a ballot and not the bigger-than-life egos of the so-called 'black leadership' that cause so many Americans to change the channel.

If Prairie View produced the week's best in American politics, then the low point arrived today, when Ralph Nader announced the beginning of another soon-to-be-failed presidential campaign.

That's right: four-time loser and self-acclaimed consumer advocate Ralph Nader is running for president…again. Sure, Nader seems to have started his public career in a far, far better place than he now occupies, but it is now nearly impossible to deny those who claim that his ego is the biggest thing in politics—far bigger than Obama's ears, much chunkier than Hillary's thighs, more pendulous than McCain's neck wattles, and blockier than the Bible-shaped lump in Huckabee's pocket.*** Nader's announcement has most Americans asking "Why?"****

It would be self-serving, and, thus, politically wise, for Republicans to encourage his candidacy—just in case Nader can siphon off votes from a more liberal candidate if things are close, like they were in Florida in 2000—but even the Reverend/Governor Huckabee has to be shaking his head. Even he stands a greater chance of being the next president than Ralph Nader.

Notes:

*Love of Truth compels me to note that I, Arb Elbow, am currently registered as a Republican in the 'great state' of Texas.

**Those among you familiar with the state of public transportation in Texas will immediately understand why not having your own car is such a huge hurdle.

***No, he is not merely happy to see you.

****Granted, many will be asking, "WTF?"

In Love? In Line?

It seems like at least half of the adage is true: Democrats really have fallen in love with their two leading candidates for the nomination. Obama and Clinton supporters get weak-kneed at the sight of their icons and go all gooey when hearing their sound bites on the evening news. Republicans, on the other hand, aren't quite where they need to be to hold up their end of the adage. The most powerful single faction in what they refer to as their "big tent," the Christian conservatives, those who like their politics with a heavy admixture of that old-time religion, aren't yet falling in line. Sure, evangelicals/fundamentalists have held their noses and taken the plunge for McCain, but the Huckleberries, the Reverend/Governor Huckabee's die-hard supporters across the Bible Belt, are in danger of leaving the tent.

For the Democratics there is the charm of genetic diversity. Both candidates are visibly, genetically different from every person who has ever held the office for which they are running. As the party that has certainly gone farther out of its way to champion diversity, it must make their hearts go pitter-patter that, regardless of which of their candidates wins the nomination, they will have the chance to produce the first president who is not a white male. There seems to be, floating around the rank-and-file Democrats, an attitude of "It's about time" with regards to this.

It has, in fact, become almost impossible to focus on any differences between Clinton and Obama, except for their gender and race. Excluding the occasional shrill note, both Democratic candidates seem to be involved in a genteel, gloves-on type of campaign. How could they not? The angles and lines of their positions are so similar that they are nearly congruent. Is Obama masking his relative lack of experience by becoming Hillary's policy doppelganger, a less divisive, more charismatic offering, who brings most of the benefits with fewer of the disadvantages of a Hillary candidacy? Is Hillary hewing so closely to the same policies and themes, which she knows are largely mirrored by Obama, because she lacks the vision and/or the charisma to strike out into the uncharted territory of new ideas? Or can we believe that their common policy positions are so nearly perfect that they do not require change?

The Democrats' choice will finally boil down to which voting constituencies believe they have the most to gain from choosing either the experienced, but divisive, woman or the charismatic, but relatively unknown, black man. This is not—repeat: NOT—really a step forward for either a colorblind or a gender-neutral society. Other than their personalities, however, their avowed policies give us little but their race and gender to tell them apart.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have already found their candidate, but Huckabee's Huckleberries don't seem to have noticed. Or they just don't care. I have written at length in previous posts about possible motivations for the Reverend/Governor Huckabee's remaining in the race, despite the statistical impossibility of winning. I have written almost nothing about the Huckleberries. The truth is that they are behaving like Democrats: they have fallen in love with their candidate. The Reverend/Governor is everything the Christian conservative wing of the Republican Party wants: a rock-ribbed social conservative, who blurs the church/state line and whose powers of communication rival that of Ronald Reagan. For them, the chance to vote in support of an evangelical/fundamentalist Christian presidential candidate, who has clearly intimated that he would favor their religious convictions over those of their fellow citizens, trumps the possibility that they might be damaging their party's chances to win the White House in November.

Besides, they can't really wrap their hearts around supporting McCain, who has yet to convince them that he will be any more conservative on social issues than whichever candidate the Democrats serve up.

This state of affairs represents quite a change from the fight for the Republican nomination in 2000, when quite a few Republican moderates were falling in love with John McCain. It might be difficult to recall, after eight years of watching him kiss up to a more than moderately incompetent Bush administration, but McCain was a maverick candidate, who offered a breath of fresh air after two terms of Hillary's husband. We must, in deference to the Truth, admit that Barack Obama is right in saying that "the wheels have fallen off the Straight Talk Express," but eight years ago McCain's brand of straight talk won the hearts of moderates. Although it could overcome neither the inertia of the evangellically-anointed Bush candidacy nor the wiles of Karl Rove in the South Carolina primary, McCain's candidacy struck a chord with those moderates who had fallen in love with the idea of a Republican candidate who did not kowtow to the religious right on every issue.

This time around McCain, despite the fact that he kowtows daily to the religious right, has acquired an inertia of his own, having allowed Romney and Huckabee to split the Christian conservative votes in the early primaries while he built up a substantial lead in delegates. When Romney dropped out, Huckabee's numbers surged and he began to win states in the Bible Belt, but the miracle necessary to overcome McCain's inertia has not materialized. Most Republicans are falling in line behind this candidate, who seems unappetizing to some, but appears to be the best option on their party's menu to win in November.

Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line. This year Democrats' love for their both of their candidates seems to be uniting their party far more than dividing it. For the GOP, however, the Huckleberries' love of their candidate, which has extended past all reasonable hopes of his winning the nomination, is widening the cracks in the coalition that has brought them such great electoral success.

In 1988, the far right wing of the Republican Party fell in line behind the more moderate George H.W. Bush because he had served under Reagan and because he made the right noises about sharing their values. Now, after decades of having been the gatekeepers for their party's nomination, the Christian conservatives are having difficulty falling out of love with Huckabee and into line behind McCain.

Reverse-Engineering a Perfect Marriage, Part II

In the first part of this attempt to reverse-engineer a perfect marriage from a perfectly dysfunctional one we looked at anger, taking your spouse for granted, avoiding your spouse, lack of communication, and refusing to compromise as ways to really mess things up. In the conclusion we hit the final five of our top ten ways to really screw up your relationship.

Some readers of part one were quick to offer sympathies on the horrendous state of my marriage—and I do appreciate them—but these steps to a marital hell are not especially autobiographical. Sure, we’ve had issues with just about all of these things at one time or another, but even at our worst we didn’t really put in the time and effort that would have been required to make our marriage the worst marriage on earth.

Here is the second half of our list of ways you can make your marriage as far from perfect as possible:

6. Eliminate all physical demonstrations of affection. These include: hand-holding, hugging, kissing, walking arm-in-arm, back rubs, foot massages, and any other pleasant physical contact, including S-E-X. These outward signs of a functioning relationship can sometimes interfere with the inner path to true marital dysfunction. Recently, a preacher, concerned with the divorce rate in his area, made the news by telling the (married) couples in his flock to have sex daily. He’s right, sex usually makes marriage more pleasurable; so avoid it if you want to up the ante of misery.

7. Deception is ideal for making your marriage worse. It really isn’t important what you choose to deceive your spouse about, just make sure to do it often. The increased stress and anxiety you feel while weaving your tangled web will surely be rewarded by the anger, disappointment, and distrust that result from your spouse’s discovery of the truth. In a similar vein, breaking promises you have made to your spouse can certainly become a kind of deception if you do it often enough. So keep at it!

8. Make sure that your marital problems greatly impact the lives of your children. Vent anger at your spouse in their direction every so often. Display for them the appropriate way to show contempt and scorn for one of their parents. Teach them that name-calling and shouted profanity are appropriate means of interacting with those you love. Criticize them by tellng them that they’re just like your spouse. Emphasize spending very little time doing things “as a family” because family things aren’t as important as being upset/angry/hurt.

9. Share your problems with the world. Understand that in order to truly enjoy a dysfunctional marriage, you must ensure that friends, family, acquaintances, and more than a few strangers are aware of what a bastard/bitch your spouse really is. The aim here is to belittle and/or humiliate. Ideally, this information should be imparted to the third party in question in the presence of your spouse, but behind-the-back slander is better than no slander at all if you are seeking true dysfunction. If your audience can still sympathize with your husband/wife after they’ve heard you out, then you need to work on your delivery.

10. More extreme measures such as verbal or physical abuse or adultery can be employed if the above guidelines have been tried and have failed to produce a terrible, dysfunctional marriage. Be careful, however, because both adultery and abuse have a tendency to lead quickly to the end of a relationship, rather than the proudly dysfunctional marriage you hope to achieve.

After reading and memorizing the list, a near-perfect marriage is only a single step away. All you have to do is to avoid doing any of the above and you should have a perfect marriage. Simple, eh? Good luck!

Reverse-engineering A Perfect Marriage, Part I

Long ago, before we figured out that whatever is making our marriage sick cannot be cured by marriage counseling, our marriage counselor asked the following question: “What do you imagine the perfect marriage would be like?”

Needless to say, we were stumped. While marriage is something the vast majority of the population will experience, few people claim to have achieved perfection at it. My friends and I are not among that few. We had no idea what a perfect marriage looked like, let alone how to achieve one for ourselves.

Later, like the proverbial bolt from the blue, it struck me. The specifications for a perfect marriage would have to be reverse-engineered from a truly lousy one.

All that remained was to figure out how to have the most miserably dysfunctional marriage possible in order to discover what a perfect marriage would be like. After considerable thought on the matter, here are ten steps to take in order to have a terrible, dysfunctional marriage:

1. Get angry all the time with each other. Whether it is appropriate or not, just get mad and vent your anger on the other person. Overreact to small provocations. Take out your frustrations with things outside the home on your immediate family. Try to ‘win’ every fight/discussion. Be sarcastic--and verbally abusive, too. Use anger to get out of tasks/situations you’d rather not be in. Make venom and bile part of your family’s daily menu. Provoke your spouse to get them angry—pass it around! Damn the emotional damage it causes, full speed ahead with your wrath! And always, Always, ALWAYS hold a grudge.

2. Take your partner for granted. Hold the belief that they’ll just always be there. Make sure that it seems like you don’t care enough to appreciate their efforts. Don’t bother asking them to do you favors or help you out—tell them to do it with an attitude that says, “Be damned if you don’t.” Certainly, try to place no emphasis upon what your spouse believes to be important. Make no effort to seek their input before making plans or spending large amounts of money. Criticize their efforts harshly if they do not meet your expectations—regardless of the circumstances or extenuating factors—because the only thing that matters is results, to hell with intentions. Most important of all: if you make an error, never EVER admit to it, let alone apologize, because to apologize is to lessen yourself and to elevate your spouse higher than they deserve.

3. Try to spend as little time as possible with your spouse. Try to ensure that through your words and behavior your spouse understands that you’d rather not have them around or that you’re annoyed/embarrassed by their presence. Avoid them and always make sure they know it’s their fault that they are being avoided.

4. De-emphasize communication. Proper communication makes appropriately vituperative fighting far more difficult and makes it less likely you will remember to take your spouse for granted. Communicating also counts as spending time with your spouse and should be avoided for that reason alone.

5. Never compromise. In a genuinely dysfunctional relationship one spouse is always right and the other is forever wrong. Compromising means that you are unsure as to which spouse you are. Don’t make that mistake.

As you can see, just mastering the first five of our ten steps to dysfunction would make your marriage an almost perfectly miserable place to be. Come back later this week for Part II and see how deception, abuse, adultery, public humiliation, and children can help you make things even worse.

The Other Elephant In The Room

Mike Huckabee is neither bad at math, nor actually hoping for a convention “miracle.” He is striving mightily to adhere to the “I majored in miracles, not math” line, but can anyone say they believe him in the face of the delegate counts that even my eleven-year-old son could explain to him? What is actually going on is that Mike Huckabee is doing something far more impressive than Bill Clinton’s verbal limbo dance regarding the Lewinski affair, Huckabee has been doing an excellent job of getting America to believe a lie—without actually telling a lie.

What lets us know that Mike Huckabee is lying about staying in the race is the fact that it is February 15 and he is still in the race. He is the other elephant in the room and, finally, people are beginning to talk about it. Important Republican leaders are dropping hints that it might be time for him to drop out of the race and stop dividing the party, but Huckabee is ignoring those hints.

What we need is for Mike Huckabee to place his right hand on the Bible and make the following statement: “I solemnly swear in the sight of God almighty that I continued campaigning for the Republican nomination after Super Tuesday’s delegate counts were made known to me because I honestly believed that I still had a realistic chance to be the Republican Party’s candidate in 2008 or that the chance a divinely-inspired miracle would give me victory at the convention was greater than the chance I would weaken my party’s chances of winning in November.”

I believe that Huckabee is a genuinely religious man and, so, I will believe him if he makes the above oath. Otherwise, we need to find out why he won’t drop out of the race when he has no chance to win.

Is he really running for the vice presidency, as some suggest? Hardly. Look at John McCain. Does he really seem like the kind of man who would reward the guy who has been jerking him around and embarrassing him? McCain’s reputation as a political opportunist leads us to the conclusion that it is still possible, but it is also quite possible that McCain will hold a grudge.

Is Huckabee grinding it out to the end with an eye towards gathering support in the primaries before breaking away from the party and running as an independent? Not likely. Huckabee is smart and knows a run as an independent would split the conservative vote and guarantee a Democratic victory in November. Running as an indie would be breaking the rules of the party and likely guarantee that he could never be a Republican nominee for the Presidency. Elephants never forget.

Despite his statements hinting to the contrary, it seems unlikely that he believes in even the possibility that Mitt Romney’s delegates will support him en masse, now that Romney has endorsed McCain. It doesn’t matter whether Huckabee majored in Math, miracles, or mud pies; he understands the numbers as well as anyone else in the party.

CNN quotes him as saying, "I think it would be a great disservice to the country and to my own party to just give up and quit because it looks like, you know, the numbers are trending toward John McCain." Why would it be a disservice? Since he can’t take the nomination from McCain, wouldn’t it be helpful to his party to unite it rather than divide it. If he actually believes Republican “ideals” are better than Democratic “ideals,” wouldn’t he actually be doing his country a favor by beginning to marshal support for McCain?

In my previous entry, “Not Smart Enough To See,” I detailed the case for Huckabee’s grinding it out in 2008 in order to position himself for 2012. This still seems likely, but another result of his staying in the race (and claiming the support of even more primary voters who are too conservative to support McCain) is that he is the most likely candidate to fill the coming party power vacuum, which will be created when George W. Bush and his part of the party organization lose their position as the most important voice in the party at the end of his term in office.

If John McCain loses the general election in November, Mike Huckabee will become the most important voice in the Republican Party. He will speak for the base, and the rest of the party will be forced to listen.

Huckabee, in gaining the support, money, and primary votes of the hard-core end of the conservative spectrum, is rapidly on his way to supplanting people like James Dobson and the leaders of other conservative special interest groups as the voice of the Christian conservative and/or religious fundamentalist grassroots. Why would Joe Conservative donate to Focus On The Family in the hopes that it will work to bring about the conservative agenda, when he can give the money directly to good ol’ Reverend Mike's 2012 campaign? President Huckabee could do more to enact that agenda than a thousand Dobsons.

Dobson, who held back endorsing a candidate until February 8th, wisely chose to endorse Huckabee. This ensures that Huckabee will work through Hobson and Focus On The Family, rather than working around the group, if and when he moves to consolidate his support among Republicans following a McCain defeat in November. Other evangelical leaders, Gary Bauer among them, have endorsed McCain in an attempt to unite the party, perhaps in part because they fear their political leadership roles will be marginalized if McCain loses due to a division in the ranks.

Short of hearing Governor Huckabee swear the oath mentioned above, we can’t really know why he has not yet withdrawn from the race and thrown his support behind his party’s frontrunner. All we can do is to see how things play out and try to figure out the intentions from the results. Of course, all bets are off if a “miracle” actually does occur.

Not Smart Enough To See

While I’m not sure about electronic voting machines that do not leave a paper trail, I do emphatically believe that technology has led to dramatic improvement in the American political process. What else could I think as I watched CNN overanalyze every aspect of tonight’s primaries in High Definition? (We political spectators are part of the process, too.) Wolf Blitzer’s well-trimmed nose hairs never looked better than they did tonight on my widescreen HDTV as he interviewed Mike Huckabee about his primary victories. Huckabee’s answers, however, demonstrated that technology has a long way to go before it can make dramatic improvements in the candidates themselves.

At some point amid the usual primary night softballs Blitzer was lobbing, Wolf threw one a teensy bit harder. Huckabee, unclear how to respond, actually leaned in and took it on the helmet. Blitzer had asked the former Baptist minister/Arkansas governor what he hoped to achieve by staying in the race when it was extremely unlikely that he had any chance to get enough delegates to win the Republican nomination or even to keep John McCain from getting enough delegates to force a “brokered” convention. Huckabee’s answer was, essentially, “We’re not smart enough to see that far down the road.”

Sure, Huckabee was right about Republicans wanting a choice of candidates, instead of just accepting the ‘annointed’ candidacy of John McCain. Now they can choose a candidate who’s not very good at making plans to anticipate likely future events and cannot attract campaign staffers who are able to count to 1191. Seven years of George W. Bush’s presidency has taught most of the rest of us that this is not the direction in which we wish to go in 2008.

Mitt Romney dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination because: a) he knew he could not win; and b) staying in would be bad for the party. Despite his “aww shucks” answer to Blitzer’s common-sense question, Huckabee is and will remain in exactly the same position Romney was in because he knows he cannot win and will hurt his party in the 2008 general election by staying in the race for the nomination. Why, then, did he lie to Wolf Blitzer?

The answer lies, I think, in the what the TV news analysts keep saying over and over (as they continue to demonstrate to us all that round-the-clock, minute-to-minute coverage of each primary’s every hiccup is too much coverage). Democrats are coming out to vote in these primaries and caucuses in record numbers, while Republicans…well, not so much. Psychology, economic theory, and common sense all tell us that most people will expend the time and effort to undertake an action like voting if they think they have a chance to make a difference. Democrats, witnessing the ongoing train wreck that is the Bush administration, feel they have the chance to choose the next President of the United States by voting in these primaries. Republicans…well, again, not so much.

I think Huckabee knows the damage that he may be causing his party by staying in this contest is a moot point, because he, like many of the Republican voters that have stayed home for these primaries, doe not believe that McCain—or any Republican nominee—has a real chance in November. So, when McCain loses after failing to “energize the base” of his party, who will be in the perfect position when ‘the base’ goes looking for a candidate to dethrone the Democratic president in 2012?

How will a decision by Huckabee to stay in the race, which winds up hurting McCain in the general election, affect his support among the Christian conservatives that have become such a large part of the Republican base? Answer: Not at all, because they never liked McCain in the first place. They tend to display the same all-or-nothing mentality when it comes to politics as they do in most aspects of their lives.

Huckabee will have counties and counties full of red-state voters, donor lists, and the rudimentary campaign organization he put together for this election just waiting for 2012, tuned up and ready to go by whoever wants to be the next Karl Rove. Unlike McCain, who started nearer the center and has tried unconvincingly to make a sincere reach for the rightward end of his party, Huckabee will start off with the religious right already secured (he is a Baptist preacher, after all) and he will be a lot more convincing when he makes his reach towards the center.

Of course, Huckabee could have been telling the truth when he told Wolf Blitzer that he (and the people who honestly believe that he would be the best person to the next President of the United States) are not “smart enough to see that far down the road.” Unfortunately, even if it is true, it might not cost him a single vote among the Christian conservatives, who have never shown a propensity for selecting candidates based on intellectual ability.