The Huckabee candidacy challenges almost all the leading conservative as well as Republican partisan spokesmen. Most fear him, many despise him. Their strong temptation is to keep trying to explain to his voting base why he is unacceptable: his record of increasing taxes and spending in Arkansas, for example; his opposition to school choice (except home schooling) and his worrisome positions on illegal immigration. Then, despite his hawkishness on defense and fighting terrorism, there are his provocative sentences in Foreign Affairs that the Bush Administration has been arrogant in foreign policy.
Finally, Huckabee wears his religion on his sleeve. This actually helps him with Christians of many kinds, including some liberal ones, and it isn't all that different from, say, Barack Obama. But it puts off a great many other people who think it is presumptuous, that it oversteps the lines that unite Americans.
These are legitimate concerns and Huckabee and his backers need to address them carefully and thoroughly. He cannot go far if he loses a large share of the Republican vote, after all. Even a Republican president who got elected on "values" issues and then pushed high taxes and high domestic spending would wind up ruining his party for decades. So Huckabee has a lot of catch-up work to do and not much time to do it.
On the other hand, it also is plain that few big name pundits and GOP leaders are in tune with the voters Gov. Huckabee has attracted. In fact, the "values voters" routinely are taken for granted by such grandees. If the old Reagan coalition has been a family of defense hawks, small government advocates and social conservatives, the step-children in the family have been the social conservatives for a very long time. And they resent it. Many conservative publishers, columnists and editors are themselves irreligious or at least tepid in their faith; or they have internalized the Left's "wall of separation" idea. Consciously or not, they drink at the well of New York Times-style social bias. They can't help looking down on religious people, especially evangelicals. They don't bother reading the work of the social conservatives or studying their views or even talking with them. When they differ, they decline to debate. They and their preferred candidates just want to keep the social conservatives at arms length and then pander to them symbolically at election time.
There are many Catholics, as well as evangelicals, in the social conservative camp, and a number of religious Jews. Even some philosophical "stoics," who appreciate the policy positions, if not the faith elements. There are many public intellectuals and writers. For conservative pundits and partisans to condescend to these people is not just offensive, it is politically foolhardy.
If ANY of the Republican candidates for president had bothered to research the philosophy and policy recommendations of the social conservatives and--to the maximum extent possible--incorporate those positions into their own, it would have been noticed. There would have been a response. Fred Thompson, in particular, had the chance to do so and threw it away almost casually. He just assumed, wrongly, that he knew all about these voters. Even earlier, Sam Brownback, a senator who has thought deeply and is devoted to all that "makes us human," failed to connect with his own natural base. He didn't seem to trust his own instincts. He, too, thought he knew all about social conservatives, but he didn't.
Then along came Huckabee.
Now, either Huckabee figures out how to assure the rest of the conservative base, or his opponents figure out how to understand and reach out to the kind of people he has attracted, or there really will be a conservative crack-up this fall.