I am sympathetic to what I take to be Ross Douthat’s basic point in this op-ed: that many conservatives have been too harsh in their attacks on Mike Huckabee and John McCain, and the disproportion of their attacks is one reason many voters have not paid them heed. But I think he has stacked the deck in favor of this thesis.

[R]eligious conservatives who listened to James Dobson were asked to believe that Mr. McCain’s consistent pro-life voting record was less important than the impact his campaign-finance bill had on the National Right to Life Committee’s ability to purchase issue ads on television 60 days before an election.

Ross may be referring to a specific comment by Dobson with which I am not familiar. But in general, pro-lifers who have criticized McCain on pro-life grounds have been much more concerned about his stance on federal funding for embryo-destructive stem-cell research than about his campaign-finance legislation. Douthat then writes that Huckabee “found himself caricatured as a ‘Christian socialist’ because he had raised gas taxes and cigarette taxes while governor of Arkansas.” I’m afraid Ross is being a bit of a caricaturist here himself.

I think that more temperate and focused critiques of both candidates would have better served conservatism, and would also have been more effective at deflating their candidacies. (I made some comments to this effect in a recent article on Huckabee.) But while Douthat has a pro-forma acknowledgment that some of the conservative criticisms of McCain and Huckabee may have been correct, the thrust of his article is to deny that conservatives have ever had any serious reason to worry about either man. And even someone making the case for them has to concede that they have.