How Mike Huckabee became the new Sarah Palin: St. Joan of the Tundra taught him the art of inviting ridicule and turning it into victimization.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

In late January a once-dominant figure in Republican politics suddenly began hinting at a presidential run and got a lot of negative feedback. It had to make Mitt Romney feel better.

Yes, 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin pointedly refused to take herself out of the running for 2016. There were few cheers. And in a first, when Palin subsequently gave a scatterbrained and embarrassingly juvenile speech at Representative Steve King's Iowa Freedom Summit, conservatives were as scornful as liberals.

In part that's because the ratio between her brief career of statewide public office in Alaska and her subsequent self-promoting isn't improving. But in part it's also because she's proved to be eminently replaceable in Republican politics.

St. Joan of the Tundra's distinctive contribution to the conservative cause was not simply to serve as a lightning rod for resentment of the "liberal elites" that supposedly run the country, but to invite ridicule that she then turned into a sense of victimization and self-pity and a hankering for vengeance. For a while there, she could do no wrong, since every misstep turned into an opportunity for a fresh grievance against the mockery of snooty elitists.

Palin will hang around the periphery of conservative politics for some time (she's a relatively young fifty). Her essential role of stimulating resentment and then promising vengeance, however, has been taken over by more conventional and respectable pols, much as George Wallace's raw demagogic appeal in the 1960s was co-opted and refined by Richard Nixon. Indeed, one of the more notable developments of contemporary politics is the widespread preemption of Palin-style posturing against elites by other Republicans. These include potential 2016 presidential candidates ranging from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who has been seeking to brand himself as the champion of conservative Christians besieged by secularists and Muslims, to Mike Huckabee, whose new book, God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy, is a seething cauldron of resentment toward those who do not inhabit what Palin once memorably called "the real America." But to a dangerous extent the whole party has absorbed some of the poison.

The mainstreaming of Palin's act really began almost as soon as she burst onto the national scene in September of 2008, when Paul Krugman noted that the chip on the shoulder she exhibited was being emulated by other speakers at the Republican National Convention.

What struck me as I watched the convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger...