The Crossed Pond

Via the American Conservative, via Freedom Democrats, comes this piece by Doug Wead. Wead is a leader in the evangelical movement of some note, and he poses the pop quiz: “Why did Huckabee and Paul stay in the race so long?”

Answer: “They were collecting names and addresses.”

Well, you say, why didn’t candidates do that in the past? They tried. They have always tried. But not many candidates have a readymade, built in constituency. Ron Paul has a political movement going for himself. There has been nothing like it since Goldwater. And Huck is the only choice for Evangelicals who are spurned by media and other candidates.

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And what will they do with it? They will raise money, of course. If Huckabee had had money this time, he would have arguably won South Carolina and the nomination. Governor Mike Huckabee, like him or not, is the future of the Evangelical wing of the Republican Party because he now has “the list.”

And whatever anyone says about Ron Paul, his so called “fringe,” is the only political movement left with a systematic argument for the role of government. He talks about strategic issues, while all the rest quibble over tactics. There is no question that the Paulists now have the intellectual and moral power. They are ignored or ridiculed because no one can answer their arguments. And those arguments, left unanswered, will only cause their movement to grow.

I think that evangelicals in particular are a bit over-enthused about the notion of “the list”. But that’s understandable—voter and donor databases were the backbone of the evangelical movement, and arguably of American political machines of all stripes during the 20th century (something that Wead gives a Crib Notes sketching of). In fact, some claim that the biggest boost Barack Obama got this year—what vaulted him from rising star to political machine—was John Kerry giving him an early endorsement and far, far more importantly, his “list” from 2004. I’m not sure that, in this day and age of cell phones and contact info transiency, that the values of lists aren’t a bit on the decline from their highpoint in the 80s, but I can say, anecdotally but with a bit of insider cred, that already by New Hampshire, the Ron Paul campaign was OBSESSED by “the list”. I can also say that, by now, the lists that Huckabee and Paul got over the early courses of their campaigns are worth more than anything else that came out of the Republican primaries through March—and I mean that monetarily as much as anything. Paul’s list is probably worth many millions.

It’s an interesting angle to think about, and my impression is that thus far Paul and his people are still trying to figure out what to do with their massive database. Huckabee, I suspect, knows EXACTLY what he’ll do with his. But either way, the lists represent a massive network, a donor tree, that, again, political movements have been built upon. It doesn’t buy them a place at the table. It buys them a table of their own, if they use it wisely.

Anyway, the payoff for Wead’s article is this:

What’s next? Sometime, when all of this settles down, after McCain has not picked Mike Huckabee as his running mate, Huck will announce his Political Action Committee. We will hear a lot from Mike Huckabee next time around. His is a personal campaign.

And Ron Paul? His is a campaign of ideas. His enemies in the political arena and in the media will come to realize too late that they made a mistake by ignoring him this past election cycle. His army was left unchallenged on the battlefield. Now their ideas have taken root and they will grow. After the years of Obmamania are passed and Huckabee’s quixotic challenge four years later is exhausted, Ron Paul’s movement will still be maturing. Obama, Clinton, McCain and in four years, Huckabee, will own the headlines for now. But Ron Paul owns the future.

A rather different point, I think, then the one about the lists, but equally true.