| Americablog is discussing how Mike Huckabee is starting to attack other Republican candidates, specifically Romney, and the conservative Republican base for hypocrisy:
Without naming names, the GOP presidential hopeful complained that some in his party - particularly Christian evangelicals - "talk as if, in this election cycle, Republican candidates aren't going to be held to a standard of personal accountability and responsibility for their personal lives."
"If that's true, there are going to be a lot of Republicans who will owe Bill Clinton a great big public apology," Huckabee said. "We can't have a set of rules that we apply to Democrats that we don't apply to ourselves.
"If we apply a different set of rules, then we have exposed one of the greatest levels of hypocrisy in the last generation of politics." Huckabee said.
It isn't just calling out his own party on hypocrisy that is potentially useful, here. It is also interesting that his charge has a clear element of the dreaded "electability" narrative in it:
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee warned Thursday that nominating Mitt Romney would leave the party vulnerable to Democratic charges of flip-flopping that could endanger GOP chances of winning the White House in 2008.(…)
"Let's assume everything is hunky dory with his views now," he said. "The problem is not so much where he is but where he was and the fact that that's a change and not just on that issue but on a number of others. What's problematic is that it does represent a dramatic shift and the obvious thing that a Democrat[ic] opponent will do to him is to say he shifted once, will he shift again?"
Here, Huckabee approaches the concept of electability from a conservative angle. He does not see Romney hold unpopular views as a problem, so much as that he has switched his views and will thus be vulnerable to a charge of being a "flip-flopper" or generally standing for nothing except achieving power. However, most Republicans seem to be drawing a different conclusion on electability than Huckabee, and are instead turning toward a seemingly more "moderate" candidate because he is perceived as more electable. According to the latest CNN national poll, not only does Rudy Giuliani lead, but it appears that one of the main reasons he leads is because a significant percentage of Republicans perceive him to be the most electable candidate:
Forty-four percent of the 357 registered voters who describe themselves as Republican or independents leaning Republican said they believe Giuliani is the most likable among the GOP candidates, and another 44 percent said they believe he has the best chance of beating the Democratic nominee come November 2008.
And 35 percent said they believe Giuliani is a strong leader, with 30 percent saying he is qualified to be president. On those questions, McCain comes in second place, with 20 percent and 29 percent, respectively.
Asked which candidate is most honest, 22 percent picked Giuliani, 18 percent selected McCain and Thompson.
Giuliani's highest scores are on electability and "likeability," both of which must be playing a significant role in his current national polling advantage.
The reason this is important is because "electability," as the concept has most commonly been used over the past two decades, always has had a strong ideological aspect to it. Specifically, until recently it has been traditionally been conventional wisdom that more "centrist" Democratic candidates are more "electable" (Republican candidates have not recently had to cope with this term themselves). Granted, other concepts have been attached to the term as well, including whether someone was a Governor or a Senator, whether someone served in the military or not, and the region or state from which a candidate hails. However, since at least 1988, when Dukakis refused to call himself a "liberal," the concept of electability has been metonymically (part for the whole) interchangeable with the concept of "centrism." Now that Republicans are facing an electability problem of their own, a plurality are identifying their "centrist" option a the most electable. Thus, as long as the "electability" narrative plagues the Republican field, the conservative label will be damaged nationwide as people will view it as a losing label. Keep in mind that even as John McCain called himself a conservative far more times than any other candidate in the race, his polls numbers, once boasted by Democratic and independent support, collapsed.
As long as the specter of "electability" hangs over the Republican field, the center of American politics will shift to the left toward progressive and toward Democrats. This is a very positive development for progressives, and one we should encourage when talking about the Republican field. Since electability is connected to ideology, as long as they talk about electability, as Geroge Lakoff and Ariana Huffington have both argued, they inherently imply that we are the correct direction for the country. |
