The Southern Strategy backfiring at long last

Updated below, late Friday night and again Saturday morning.

Not as if I'm a fan of Mike Huckabee, but it sure is a kick seeing the Christian Right and the small town yokels getting a bit of their own back after being played for chumps for years by the corporate elitists who run the GOP.

At Sadly, No!, Brad has the goods on one of those elitists who let his mask drop.

A bit more temperate was the reaction of conservative activist Richard Viguerie, who for some reason has me on his mailing list.  Keep in mind that Viguerie thinks George W. Bush is a liberal:

Mike Huckabee’s victory in the Iowa caucuses is bad news for the Republican Party.

Mike Huckabee is a Christian socialist. He is a good man, but with a Big Government heart. He is the most liberal of all the Republican presidential candidates on economic issues.

Of course he is!  He was the governor of a Southern state.  You can't run a state unless you're willing to tax people and spend their money.  You can't run a Southern state unless you're willing to ask the Federal government to tax people and send their money your way so you can spend it.

Without large and regular infusions of Federal money, in the form of defense contracts, "pork," and a straight-forward handing over of bushels of cash, the South---the real South, not Atlanta's suburbs or Dallas or Florida's Gold Coast---would be a Third World country.

Americans expect their government to do things---build roads, build schools, field an army, hire a police force, put out fires, fix things after a natural disaster, keep the whole damn economy running everywhere, and that's the bare minimum of what we expect it to do, and all that, the bare minimum, costs money.  Lots of money.  The South has just been too poor for its local governments to provide all the stuff rich states take for granted.  Towns have had to rely on the states, the states have had to rely on the Feds.

This is why the South was a hotbed for Populism and economic progressivism for most of the 20th Century.

When the GOP decided to lure Southern voters, both the Evangelical crowd and the Good Old Boys, into their "Big Tent" by exploiting their hatreds, prejudices, fears, and resentments, the dark shadows of their populism, it didn't at the same time convince them to give up the lighter sides and their old free-spending, big government ways.  It didn't persuade them that they, the People, don't own the government and they should stop expecting their government to do things.

All it did was make a corrupt bargain.

You can have your big government, the elitists promised, as long as you don't ask us to pay for it with our money.

And so Ronald Reagan became the inventor of the free lunch.

Trouble is not everybody is temperamentally suited to keeping a corrupt bargain.  Republican Elitists are afraid Mike Huckabee is one of those folks with an unreliable temperament.

It's interesting that in the 40 years since the Southern Strategy was hatched, the Republicans haven't even once come close to nominating a real Southerner for President.

I happen to think that the GOP bosses will arrange for Mike Huckabee to be declared an enemy combatant and disappeared into the Gulag before they'll let him become their party's nominee.

But it's fun to watch them squirm and fume and fret and sweat as the Southern Strategy starts to backfire on them at last.

Wiping the grin off my face update:  Tristero says there's really not much to find amusing in a Huckabee's win.

Putting the grin back: At the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal, a jittery David J. Sanders hears Mike Huckabee channeling the ghost of Franklin Roosevelt.

And over at the Huffington Post, Thomas Edsall looks at, among other things, the trouble Huckabee can cause for the Republican Corporate Elitists coming out of New Hampshire.

Hat tip to Matt Yglesias.

Comments

[Deschanel]

Sigh. Is it still too late for the South to secede? Our bad, us Northerners- y'all be on your way now!

That's how I've felt the last 8 or more years. Republican rhetoric is always that blue states are godless, elitist, decadent wife-swappers, sodomites, and welfare queens.

Meanwhile, studies have consistently shown that Red State "Values voters" consume far more alcohol, pornography, have higher rates of spousal abuse and domestic violence, gamble more, and- most importantly- poor whites consume VASTLY more in welfare benefits than the black welfare queens of their fevered imagination.

I say, let them secede, let the South Rise Agin, Once It Gits off Its Lazy Ass.

[Chris the Cop]

Another thing you can't do as governor is run a multi-trillion dollar deficit and when you want to go deeper into debt, simply vote to do that. The notion that Huckabee had to balance a budget every single year is obviously lost on these 'true' conservatives.

[JD]

I am too appalled by even the faintest prospect of an ordained Baptist minister also being President of the United States to find much humor in Mike Huckabee.

[Redbeard]

Huckabee may have the problems that Tristero notes, Lance. But keep grinnin' cuz the schadenfreude is justified.

[Kit Stolz]

As a Democrat and a believer in reason, Huckabee worries me. Not so much for this year, because he obviously doesn't have a clue about policy, but for elections to come, because he obviously knows how to bamboozle the faithful. Does he remind anyone else of Andy Griffith in "A Face in the Crowd?"

[bob]

The south WILL rise again. Shit floats.

[MBunge]

I don't quite understand the furor over the Huckster. If what he represnts is really so horrible, isn't it far better for it to be dragged out into the light so everyone can see it and judge for themselves?

Mike

[Michael Bains]

Kit makes the point that makes my skin crawl vis-a-vie Huck. I think it's great - this year - if dude gets the GOP nomination. I've read enough apocalyptic SF (and seen Ronnie lose to the Grin in '76) to fear what that nomination could mean come 2012.

Especially is Obama gets the White House and some "crisis" comes up before his 2nd term.