In which Jonah answers his own question

Yup. Vacation blogging. And in this post, I reach back to an op-ed Jonah Goldberg wrote before Thanksgiving. "I would not vote for Paul," says Jonah, "because I think his foreign policy would be disastrous."

But there's something weird going on when Paul, the small-government constitutionalist, is considered the extremist in the Republican Party while Huckabee, the statist, is the lovable underdog. It's even weirder because it's probably true: Huckabee is much closer to the mainstream. And that's what scares me about Huckabee and the mainstream alike.

And right there, in his first sentence, we find an explanation for the supposedly "weird" Paul v. Huckabee phenomenon. At the same time, though, we avail ourselves of an even weirder one: the phenomenon of Jonah Goldberg as an elite political pundit and author.

If Ron Paul proves anything it's that one can, in an eccentric way, be both socially conservative and libertarian at the same time. He has views about immigration and abortion that fall comfortably within the party's antediluvian mainstream, and views about taxation and bureaucracy that make John Edwards look like a socialist, and George Bush look like more of a fascist. But while Paul has crazy views about the economy and crazy views about the border, he has drastically more sensible views about foreign policy (and specifically Iraq) than any of his peers do, and as such he is an absolute scourge to conservative elites.

Huckabee, by contrast, is something more like a smiling, hawkish mullah, and were it not for his compassionate rhetoric he'd probably be the favorite. As it is, though, he cares--or pretends to care--about poor people and so for now he's being treated like a a star student whose parents have grounded him for spending too much time volunteering at the expense of his grades. He's not the favorite, but he's also not seen as an out-of-the-mainstream quack. Which, I suppose, is all to say that, deep, down, elite conservatives really want another George W. Bush to present himself in the GOP pool. But of course, they can't say that. And, also of course, as long as their foreign policy mindset looks anything like Jonah Goldberg's, they'll keep "inexplicably" heaping opprobrium upon Ron Paul--lashing out at him for the very reason he's so enduringly popular in the real world.