Ross Douthat at The New Republic considers The Huckster’s “gonzo conservatism” and its fit with John McCain. He thinks it might be a fun team, though it would have some downsides. Some snippets

“…Huckabee is easily the most interesting political talent to emerge during this campaign season. But he’s also the most unpolished and unpredictable, with a longer list of enemies than any politician so new to the national stage ought to have and a regiment of Arkansas skeletons clattering around in his closet. Few of McCain’s potential veeps are so vulnerable to caricature, few would draw so much fire from within the GOP, and few are as easy to imagine lurching cheerfully off-message in the heat of the campaign, alienating a key constituency with an ill-timed gaffe or a badly played attempt at humor.”

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“…The press corps smiled on Huckabee during the primary season for many of the same reasons it liked McCain way back in 2000–because he was a plucky and accessible underdog taking on the GOP establishment on a shoestring budget. But it’s hard to imagine that he’d earn the same sort of favorable coverage once reporters contemplated the prospect of having a crypto-Creationist a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

“…Picking Huckabee would represent a gamble that the future of the party lies with some odd amalgam of right-wing heterodoxies; that many of the movement-conservative institutions that served the GOP during its rise to power need to be attacked, rather than reformed; and that the best way to push the Republican Party beyond its current impasse would be to run a ramshackle, ideologically confusing, shoot-from-the-hip campaign and hope it turned out OK in the end.”

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