Mike Huckabee's cynical embrace of the Confederate battle flag in the waning days of the South Carolina Republican primary campaign didn't work - and he lost both the primary to an ascendant John McCain and his mantle of easy-going, nice-guy moderate conservative.
Laughably described by modern-day Nathan Bedford Forrest wannabes like Patrick J. Buchanan (who I like to listen to, by the way, in my own train-wreck watching Imus mode) as a "heritage symbol," the flag most Americans know as the Stars and Bars was resurrected by segregationists in the 1950s to fly about statehouse around the south. Everybody knew why it went up. Everybody knew what it meant - and to whom.
The flag is a symbol of white power, of segregationist propaganda dressed up as states rights and local rule, a Klan standard over South Carolina. And Huckabee held it to his heart in a desperate attempt to roll right of the centrist-leaning McCain, so often derided by a Republican In Name Only by the hardcore party faithful and left for dead after daring to buck the nativist, Mexican-hating strand of conservatism. So Huckabee was stripped bear, laid out as one of those old-timey Johnny Reb traitor types. The Nation got it right:
"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," the former governor of Arkansas told a crowd in Myrtle Beach, where he was campaigning in advance of the state's Republican primary on Saturday. "In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do."
In Florence, he told his supporters that, "I know what would happen if somebody comes to my state in Arkansas and tells us what to do, it doesn't matter what it is, tell us how to run our schools, tell us how to raise our kids, tell us what to do with our flag -- you want to come tell us what to do with the flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole."
Exactly when are political reporters going to acknowledge that the candidate they have presented to America as a charming, good-humored "nice guy" is running a "southern-strategy" campaign so extreme in its sensibilities, themes and language that it would have embarrassed George Wallace?
Ah, but the Confederates always lose in the end, don't they? And these days, the Glorious Cause can't get you over the hump in South Carolina.
In other news, Aaron Burr wins Nevada 51-45 despite the wildly strange protestations of an ungracious Thomas Jefferson.
from Amazon.
