I’ve been keeping an eye on the US primaries, like a few others here, and in view of what we know, thus far, about the outcome of ‘Super Tuesday’ I’d like to put up what may seem to some a bit of an audacious idea…

…the key to Barak Obama’s chances of becoming the next president of the United States may well turn out to be Mike Huckabee.

No, I am being serious here – just follow the thinking.

Let’s start with what we know of the race for the Republican nomination.

Currently we have McCain as the clear leader and looking odds-on to take the big prize and become the official Republican candidate, but…

…McCain has a problem. He’s a bit too liberal for the tastes of the Republican Party’s highly influential evangelical and social conservative wings. He doesn’t ’speak’ to the core conservative base that played a major role in propelling George W Bush into the White House and some of the major mouthpieces of the conservative right (Limbaugh and Coulter) aren’t shy in saying so.

(That said, the fact that the like Coulter and Limbaugh loathe him with a passion is, perhaps, one of the very best things that could be said of McCain.)

Romney? His campaign for the top job is close to being dead in the water. What he needed from yesterday was to run McCain much closer and put enough clear water between himself and Huckabee to make him a credible proposition as the ‘go to guy’ for social conservatives who want to stop the McCain bandwagon rolling.

He failed on both counts and the best he can hope for now, by staying in the race, is to put up a strong enough showing to force his way on to the Republican ticket in the number two slot (and hope that age and infirmity might overtake McCain if he is the eventual successor to Bush and give his the top job he covets).

And then there’s Huckabee, who has never in truth been a real contender but who has to be looking at last night’s results and thinking that maybe he could be more than a spoiler in the race. Maybe he, perhaps more so than Romney, stands a chance of forcing his way on to the final ticket as the widely acclaimed standard bearer for the social (and especially evangelical) conservative right.

Talk of the possibility of splits and in-fighting in Republican ranks in the wake of an eventual McCain victory are, almost certainly, premature and any such revolt is more likely to manifest itself as something of a ‘no-show’ on polling day rather than outright opposition to McCain, short of someone trying to pull off a really divisive and destructive move by running an an independent evangelical conservative. However a ‘no-show’ is a possibility that McCain has to take seriously and try to guard against if he is to make a serious run at the presidency – he maybe able to afford to lose a small element of the conservative ‘heartland’ vote but not too much, there is divide there that could open up and hurt his chances, one that he has to do something to bridge.

As for his preferred option, I’d suspect he’d like A N Other as his running mate, a solid and socially conservative, if unspectacular, figure with some decent experience as a senator or state governor, a voting record that stands up to scrutiny on the main conservative dog-whistle issues without giving the appearance of being too establishment and a Christian, certainly, but one who is a rather less ‘assertive’ in their beliefs than Huckabee – a believes in god but not that he has a personal hotline to god kinda guy.

Would that be enough? Across the Mid-West and parts of the South, probably, even if it didn’t quite fly in the heart of Dixie.

McCain’s other ‘get of jail free’ card is entirely outside his control, because the other factor that could pull the Christian right fully onside would be is the Democrats settle on Hillary Clinton as their candidate. Whether she’d like to admit it or not, right-wing antipathy towards the Clintons could well be strong enough to bring even the serious McCain doubters in Republican ranks behind McCain, even at the cost of a bulk order of nose-pegs (from Wal-Mart, of course) come polling day and that is something that Democrats voting in the primaries still to come have to take into account. Its in there interests to see the Republicans put up a candidate who, not to put too fine a point on, seriously pisses off a sizeable chunk of the core conservative vote, but only if they don’t put a candidate of their own to whom the religious right harbours an even greater degree of antipathy.

In short, Hillary Clinton.

This is where Huckabee comes into the frame as a factor in the Democratic race. Not only is Huckabee bleeding support away from Romney, to the clear advantage of McCain, but the amount of support that Huckabee can pull in should serve as fair indication of the maximum size of the conservative vote that McCain may not be able to fully rely on if he fails to find the right running mate to bridge the gap, and it shouldn’t take a genius to run the numbers and work out that an Obama-McCain contest may well give the Democrats an edge by way of giving them scope to exploit McCain’s differences of opinion with the conservative right in ways that would be impossible if the final showdown were to be between Clinton and McCain.

And in the event that Huckabee not only did well enough to signal the extent of McCain’s potential liabilities with the religious right but well enough to force his way onto the ticket then the all too obvious gulf that exists between McCain and Huckabee in a number of key policy areas may be ripe for exploitation. At the very least such a scenario provides ample room for running with the claim that the Republicans are trying to face both ways at the same time rather than offering the American people a coherent vision of life after Bush.

It remains to be seen how the rest of the current race for nominations will develop, and perhaps the most important question to be answered over the next few weeks will that of whether Obama has done well enough, yesterday, to carry forward the momentum he’s building over the last few weeks of his campaign into the next run of key primaries.

If he has then the Democratic nomination may be there for the taking, especially if Democrats have been paying attention to what’s happening in the Republican race.

About the author
'Unity' is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He also blogs at Ministry of Truth.
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