When The Old Tricks Stop Working

This New York Times story [1] is very telling about just how tied to Big Money the Republican Party Establishment really is — and how worried that Establishment is about its old tricks being exposed for the fraud they really are:

"Mr. Huckabee has struck a distinctly populist chord when it comes to economics. He has criticized executive pay, sympathized with labor unions, denounced 'plutocracy,' and mocked the antitax group the Club for Growth as 'the Club for Greed'...

'I see Huckabee as more of a Prairie populist than what I would consider a traditional conservative,' said former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania...He acknowledged that in some ways Mr. Huckabee’s combination of social conservatism and sympathy for the working class also touched a fault line that ran further through the Republican Party, including in his home state of Pennsylvania. 'He would do very, very well in southwestern Pennsylvania, Reagan Democrat country,' where many socially conservative working-class voters 'have a heart for the poor and, unfortunately, think of government as the answer,' Mr. Santorum said.

So basically, Republican Party leaders are acknowledging that they have been relying on tricking working class voters into not voting on economic issues. These leaders are chafing under the realization that Huckabee is implicitly undermining their old tricks in that he is gaining ground by applying his religious/altruistic rhetoric not just to social issues, but to economic issues as well.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the panic that has broken out in Republican Washington is the comment from Grover Norquist buried at the end of the article:

"'My fantasy out of this race is that Huckabee will create another Christian Coalition,' said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, recalling the group that grew out of Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign and became a political force for much of the next decade. 'If you could have the equivalent of the Christian Coalition, it would be a bulwark for the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the party.'"

That is it, right there. Norquist is saying his "fantasy" is for Huckabee to lose the race and then obediently assume the role of trickster, helping create a religious-themed front group whose goal is to keep working class social conservatives ignoring their more populist economic agenda and instead dutifully voting for the so-called "Goldwater-Reagan wing of the party" - a euphemism for the economic royalists on the Republican Party cocktail circuit in Washington.

This is truly about as honest as it gets in Republican politics. Here, finally, we have the Big Money elite in Washington so frightened that it is now running to the New York Times to scream and whine that - gasp! - when it comes to economic issues, a religious conservative may actually be somewhat serious about religious beliefs in helping the poor. Perhaps even more telling, that elite is now publicly praying that this religious conservative comes to his supposed senses and channels his energy into helping Big Money continue to perpetrate a fraud on America's working class.

Thankfully, at least some religious leaders are not falling for it:

"A few Christian conservative leaders applaud Mr. Huckabee for his independence of the other factions of the conservative movement. 'We have been saying for years that you can’t build a winning coalition based on low taxes and limited government anymore, because you need to reach out to middle-class voters,' said Randy Brinson, founder of the evangelical youth voter-registration group Redeem the Vote and a friend of Mr. Huckabee’s. 'The gulf between the haves and have-nots — that really is going on.'"

That's exactly right. You cannot build a winning coalition anymore based on economic royalism at the very time you need to reach out to a middle class that is sick and tired of that royalism. That a major Republican presidential candidate is (at least rhetorically) acknowledging that truism is what freaks out the GOP's Washington Establishment more than anything. And whether Huckabee's populism is for real or not is less important than the perception that it is. Beneath all the platitudes about "free markets" and "fairness," the crazed reaction to the perception of Huckabee tells us what the Republican Party's economic motives really are.