Huck's victim card

Ryan Sager:

'TIS the season: What better time than Christmas for an all-out war between Christian conservatives and the rest of the Republican Party?

The Evangelical insurgency of the Mike Huckabee campaign having spooked the GOP establishment into counterattacking with a vengeance, the former Arkansas governor has a plan to keep the Huckmentum rolling: Play the victim card. Hard.

"There is a level of elitism that has existed," Huckabee told the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody in an interview that ran yesterday. "People like me," he said - that is, "Evangelicals" and people "from the middle of America" - are expected to "come to the rallies and stand in lines for hours to cheer on the candidates . . . but when they got elected, behind closed doors, they would laugh at us and speak with scorn.

"It's OK if you guys get a seat on the bus," he added, mocking the tone of the country-clubbers against whom he aims to incite the pitchfork-wielding mob's rage. "But don't ever think about telling us where the bus is going to go."

It's a common complaint of the religious right. At the risk of agreeing with Huckabee (a despicable peddler of class warfare and various forms of bigotry), on this count he is without a doubt correct.

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Grievance politics is for losers. Just ask the Palestinians who have been playing the victim card for nearly 60 years. Having a positive message is the way of a winner. Demagoguery about how you have been abused will only get you so far, and as Germany showed in the 1930's it is no basis for governance.