What Jonah Goldberg looks for in a candidate

Jonah Goldberg
Associate Editor
National Review Online

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

I caught your interview with Alex Chadwick on NPR's Day by Day on Monday, and I agree with your reason for opposing Mike Huckabee. As you noted, it's not the fact that he's a Christian supremacist that should bother conservatives, it's the possibility that he might be prone to telling that truth:

Jonah Goldberg: The benefit of Bush's compassionate conservatism [in 2000] was that it was majorly a marketing slogan...

Alex Chadwick: You mean you're worried Mike Huckabee might actually mean it?

Goldberg: Yes, that's what I'm terrified of.

I'd have thought that by now, seven years into the Bush Revolution, we'd have reached the point where truthtelling would be an automatic disqualifier for someone seeking the Republican nomination for any office, let alone the presidency, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Look at Mitt Romney and Rudy Guiliani. They're both compulsive liars, but they are having a hard time holding onto first tier status.

Still, I guess all is not lost, Huckabee's I-won't-stoop-to-negative-campaigning news conference was the epitome of disingenuity, and his responses to questions about the Target Wedding Registry Scandal reached a level of chutzpah we haven't seen since Alberto Gonzales last testified to Congress. So there's hope for him yet.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot