The GOP's Biggest Problem - The Enthusiasm Gap

Charmaine Yoest writes of Huckabee and the GOP in National Review Online. She has put into words what I could not. I'll say once more, If the GOP, Fiscal Conservatives and stuffed shirt old boy conservatives don't understand what Huckabee was all about before November, the only word one can use to describe them will be LOSER. I am a Huckabee Republican. We are either the beginning of the New Republican Party or the end of the Old. Or maybe both. We aren't changing. Can the Republican Party? I will vote for McCain, but the Enthusiasm Gap is Huge.

The problem the GOP faces right now is that they never have understood the political significance of Mike Huckabee’s extraordinary candidacy and electoral buoyancy. From inside the campaign, I saw an almost inexplicable gap between who Huckabee really is and who he is perceived to be . . . and the same is true of the values voters he is leading. Over the last month I’ve been asked repeatedly why he wasn’t getting out of the race - no one ever picked up on the simple, and obvious, answer that the Governor himself repeatedly offered: his supporters didn’t want him to get out.

Mike Huckabee offered a voice for a significant portion of the electorate that feels disenfranchised. Unfortunately for the GOP, the synonym for this group is “their base.”

I do not make this observation to detract from Senator McCain’s victory in any way. His political resurrection during this campaign is one for the history books and any fair observer has to give him credit for the tenacity, determination, and leadership it took to engineer his resurgence. Nevertheless, his slim margins should be worrisome to the McCain camp.

Those of us who live and breathe politics will support him. But we’re not the ones he needs to worry about. It’s the home-schooling mom who brought her children to the Huckabee phone bank, working late into the night — she’s the one he needs to inspire. Prior to the Iowa caucus, my own children worked next to a young girl whose mom flew her up from Texas to the Des Moines HQ, just to work the phones.

It’s being able to inspire that kind of enthusiasm and devotion that takes a candidate from an asterisk to the top tier. And it’s that kind of enthusiasm that McCain is going to need to defeat the aspiring, “first-ever” candidate in an electoral change cycle.

Cynics are responding that Huckabee’s Iowa victory can be discounted because it’s a solidly evangelical red state. Maybe. Still, it might be worth recalling that President Bush won the state in 2004 with the barn-burning margin of . . . 50 percent. Closer even than Ohio.

The Republicans are going to have to find a way to address this Enthusiasm Gap. But to the extent that the GOP establishment recognizes that Huckabee was at the forefront of a political phenomenon occurring under their noses — has a previous campaign ever achieved so much with so little? — they appear to be responding by maligning it rather than attempting to mobilize it.