If Huckabee wins the GOP nom, he has a blowjob to thank for it.

[saltpoint]

Joan Didion, writing in "Clinton Agonistes" in her excellent book, POLITICAL FICTIONS:

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That a majority of Americans seemed capable of separating Mr. Clinton's behavior in this (Lewinsky) matter from his performance as president had become, by that point, irrelevant, as had the ultimate outcome of the congressional deliberation. What was going to happen had already happened: since future elections could now be focused on the entirely spurious issue of correct sexual, or "moral," behavior, those elections would be increasingly decided by that committed and well-organized minority brought most reliably to the polls by "pro-family," or values," issues. The fact that an election between two candidates arguing which has the more correct "values" left most voters with no reason to come to the polls had even come to be spoken about, by less wary professionals, as the beauty part, the bonus that would render the process finally and perpetually impenetrable. "Who cares what every adult thinks?" a Republican strategist asked The Washing POST to this point in early September 1998. "It's totally not germane to this election."

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The Right Wing -- which is to say the entire controlling personnel of the Republican Party -- and the right-wing talk hosts and the corporate media in general (which most certainly includes Cokie Roberts) pimped Bill Clinton's "moral failures" as pretext to eviscerating debate on the truer matters of a Constitutional Republic generally and how those Constitutional matters were to be threatened or undermined especially. Didion casts Kenneth Starr as The Inquisitor, an apt invocation from the Dark Ages, IMO.

Didion asserts that when you make the subject "moral failings" instead of health care or education, or foreign policy for that matter, you have blurred the screen, you have melted the scaffolding where all of us stand to build, maintain, and restore our republic, in brief: removed the context for democracy.

It's a compelling essay. Not a Clinton Democrat now or at any other time, I feel that the Lewinsky affair became the definitional smoke-and-mirrors strategy the Right Wing used for altering the atmosphere for political discourse. Not the only one, certainly. But a definitional one in the snake pit of political strategies.

Huckabee is the most recent beneficiary of this skullduggery, even if as progressives we regard him as a malevolent clown.

It's important that New Hampshire Republicans reject his candidacy. If Huckabee's candidacy fails, we have held the fort in a significant battle, since libraries, schools, and reproductive rights are at stake. If Huckabee, slick and crafty as he is, cannot ride the post-Lewinsky wave of "moral failing" to the White House, there remains no discernible national rationale for fundamentalism in the public square. The more local defeats it suffers, the healthier the national Constitutional republic is, and the more national defeats it suffers, the healthier our local democratic climates will be.

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(On the DU Spellcheck, 'Huckabee' had not been heard of. The system offered 'Hackable' and 'Suckable' as alternatives. Neutral on the first option, and I'll definitely pass on the second.)