It’s like he just won’t go away.

After the National Council for a New America (NCNA), led by Eric Cantor and other prominent conservatives, has undertaken an effort to listen and respond to the concerns of Americans disaffected with the GOP, they proceeded to get nearly every major player in the Republican Party to get on board with the undertaking.

Cantor’s in.  McCain’s in.  Palin’s in.  Romney’s in.  Barbour’s in.  Jindal’s in.

Conspicuously absent, however, is one former Arkansas governor.

Former Governor Mike Huckabee, writing in a column of Foxnews.com, has not only turned down an invitation from the group to join in the discussion, but now seems openly hostile to the group.

“A new group was recently formed that is calling itself a group of experts for the purpose of making the Republican Party attractive to voters again,” the former Republican presidential candidate wrote in a column posted Monday on the Fox News website. “The strategy is supposedly to go on a listening tour so they can talk to the American people and hear what people are concerned about.”

“It’s hard to keep from laughing out loud when people living in the bubble of the Beltway suddenly wake up one day and think they ought to have a listening tour; even funnier when their first earful expedition takes them all the way to the suburbs of Washington, D.C.”

So, what is it about the NCNA that has led Huckabee to deem its creation “a sad day in Republican politics”?  Partly the fact that, of the five major policy areas being discussed, none of them are the primary hot-button issues of social politics – gay marriage, abortion, or immigration.  Huckabee continued, saying “If the party elite want to abandon principled leadership to protect life, support traditional marriage while going along with deficit exploding spending, interference and micro-managing of private business and failing to police corruption and govern competently, then hearing aids or a panel of experts won’t help.”

While a principled argument, people like Palin, Cantor, and Jindal are hardly “party elite”.  If anything, they are anathema to much of the party elite, people like the Rockefeller Republicans in the beltway who are more concerned about getting along with others in hopes of cutting a deal than to either lead with principle or to represent the concerns of their constituents.  While a listening tour may not be the solution to all of the GOP’s ills, the open hostility to it seems to indicate that Gov. Huckabee’s priorities lie elsewhere.

My personal take is that, while social issues are important to a large amount of the Republican Party base, they also aren’t necessarily the issues that will allow the party to attract new voters in the coming years, for the main reason that people tend to be quite recalcitrant about their positions on those issues; either they’re with you or they’re not.

But giving up the ghost on them isn’t what is needed, either; what appears to be called for in this difficult electoral climate is to get out on point and say “We are Republicans.  We aren’t supporters of the profligate spending of the past or present, be it the Bush administration’s or the Obama administration’s.  We are in favor of government easing its iron grip on your pocketbook as well as over your daily life.  We don’t want to see the government picking winners and losers in business based on who the leadership’s friends are.  We support your ability to live without interference from forces domestic or abroad.  And, in addition, we support traditional American values on the grounds that our Christian upbringing and respect for tradition and the rule of law will bring the same degree of discipline and principle to our leadership.”

Hopefully what we see going forward will allow us to come together based on what unites us, rather than letting us divide ourselves based on what we’d like to see in addition.