The FundamentaList: This week in the religious right:

[Joanne98]

This week in the religious right: Romney backers face angry followers, why Huckabee will be the next leader of the religious right, and how the focus on Catholicism misses Hagee's worst views.

Sarah Posner | April 9, 2008

1. Huckabee Wins The Religious Right's Civil War.

"We have, as a movement, lost our heads." Thats from Nancy French, one of the bloggers at the still-active Evangelicals for Mitt, on the about-face by religious-right granddaddy Paul Weyrich, once a Romney supporter, who confessed to the Council for National Policy recently that he made a grievous error by spurning Mike Huckabee. French is dismayed as well by the new ad signed by a group of prominent Huckabee backers, threatening to stay home on election day if John McCain chooses Romney as a running mate. (The ad was financed by the Government is Not God PAC.)

The sometimes dyspeptic verbal skirmishes between the Romney and Huckabee camps are nothing new. Many Romney supporters see Huckabee's upstart campaign in Iowa as the beginning of the end for Romney, since it opened the door for the almost-dead John McCain to emerge victorious in New Hampshire and beyond. Romney-ites still resent Huckabee's musings to The New York Times Magazine, about whether Mormons believe Jesus and Satan were brothers. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, where Romney withdrew from the race, several (evangelical) Romney backers argued in conversations with me that Huckabee was fanning the flames of anti-Mormon sentiment and is guilty of "religious bigotry." Others pooh-poohed the idea of a Baptist preacher in the White House.

For Huckabee supporters, the flip-flopping Mormon exemplifies the mistakes evangelicals have made in hitching their wagons to insincere politicos who want them to pull the lever every Election Day but offer nothing in return. The "nothing in return" concept, incidentally, is a persistent myth -- surely the religious right has gotten plenty out of conservative judicial appointments, if not other faith-based initiatives -- and evidence of the pervasive persecution complex that drives the religious right.

Romney used to be a Kennedy-aspiring liberal, Huckabee backers say, but campaigned as the Second Coming of Reagan. Huckabee, who's neither a multimillionaire nor a Mormon, is one of them (but, as I've noted before, Huckabee is Zelig; he can be anything to anyone) so he can be trusted implicitly.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fundamentalist_040908