Fearing Huckabee

I don't underestimate Mike Huckabee. I've seen how personable he can be, and how he can get laughter and applause even from an audience that is hostile to many of his idea. (Check out, for example, his appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher.) He comes across as personable, likable, and even superficially convincing. He manages to bob and weave around direct questions without seeming excessively evasive. He keeps his cool under pressure. Those are all good things in a political candidate.

Does that mean I would vote for him? Hardly. As I've previously stated, I think that any politician who supports FairTax should be disqualified from office on that basis alone. His use of coded messages to the religious right makes Bush's similar efforts seem understated. He opposes abortion rights (a valid position), but also opposes sex education, and some (perhaps all) forms of birth control. He is anti-gay and, while championing "covenant marriage", cynically used his "covenant marriage" to his wife to obtain wedding gifts - circumventing state laws limiting the amount of gifts to public servants. His supposed belief in reform and generosity with pardons, transformed by concern for his standing in the polls into braggadocio about how many death warrants he has signed. He is ignorant of... pretty much everything, as evidenced by his stated tax policy, historic statements on AIDS, disbelief in evolution, and woeful ignorance of foreign policy.... Need I continue?

I'm not going to argue that all of this is obvious to voters. For goodness sake, last night I heard somebody on a call-in show explaining that he was trying to figure out whether to support Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul. But he's no Clinton. When the media ultimately goes after him and his scandals, I don't think he'll be able to charm his way into the nomination, and even less the Presidency.

While the Republican Party's fear of a Huckabee nomination is palpable, Bill Kristol attempts to turn conventional wisdom on its ear and make his potential victory a bad thing for Democrats.

Some Democrats are licking their chops at the prospect of a Huckabee nomination. They shouldn’t be. For one thing, Michael Bloomberg would be tempted to run in the event of an Obama-Huckabee race — and he would most likely take votes primarily from Obama. But whatever Bloomberg does, the fact is that the Republican establishment spent 2007 underestimating Mike Huckabee. If Huckabee does win the nomination, it would be amusing if Democrats made the same mistake in 2008.

Okay... let's review.

First we assume Huckabee and Obama are nominated. Next we assume that "well-born" and monied Republicans are so happy with this outcome that they push Michael Bloomberg as a third party candidate, pouring their time and money into Bloomberg's campaign. Strangely, Kristol does not imagine that Bloomberg will draw any votes from Obama. That should leave Obama with a comfortable lead in the polls. Except Kristol also assumes that Huckabee will siphon away support from Obama - so much that he could win the election.

This seems to come back to the Republican attack machine's line that Huckabee is a liberal populist and, of course, every Democratic candidate is a liberal populist. Thus, when asked to choose between a Democratic Illinois senator with a progressive record on social issues, and a Republican Arkansas governor with a reactionary record on social issues, voters truly won't be able to tell the difference. And this is before we consider the investment Bloomberg and right-wing 527 groups would be making in trying to draw voters away from Huckabee - Bloomberg will need those votes to win.

Am I arguing that the Democratic Party has nothing to fear from Huckabee, or shouldn't take him seriously if he in fact gets the nomination? Not at all. But I'm not convinced by Kristol's straw man. Is he truly trying to convince Democrats that Huckabee is a threat, or is he trying to convince himself that his party still has a shot at winning the next election?

A question for Kristol's next column on this subject: Who does he imagine is going to bankroll a Mike Huckabee presidential campaign, particularly if Bloomberg enters the race?

I Haven't Seen Him This Angry Since Clinton Was Elected....

Had Romney won in Iowa, would George Will be this angry?

Huckabee fancies himself persecuted by the Republican "establishment," a creature already negligible by 1964, when it failed to stop Barry Goldwater's nomination. The establishment's voice, the New York Herald Tribune, expired in 1966. Huckabee says that "only one explanation" fits his Iowa success "and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people." God so loves Huckabee's politics that He worked a Midwest miracle on his behalf? Should someone so delusional control nuclear weapons?

Did Will similarly decry George W. Bush's allusions to being guided by the hand of God, or does it only matter in this case because will thinks Huckabee believes what he says, whereas G.W.... And that's the rub, isn't it?

Like Job after losing his camels and acquiring boils, the conservative movement is in distress. Mike Huckabee shreds the compact that has held the movement's two tendencies in sometimes uneasy equipoise. Social conservatives, many of whom share Huckabee's desire to "take back this nation for Christ," have collaborated with limited-government, market-oriented, capitalism-defending conservatives who want to take back the nation for James Madison. Under the doctrine that conservatives call "fusion," each faction has respected the other's agenda. Huckabee aggressively repudiates the Madisonians.

Huckabee's "faction" is supposed to bring out the voters for the wealthy elite who run the Republican Party, and gratefully accept the crumbs scattered to them following each election. There has long been the whisper that swing voters shouldn't be overly concerned about the Republican Party's overtures to the religious right, because they have no intention of carrying out their promises. The problem is, the religious right is dissatisfied with lip service. Having seen G.W. run the government with, for most of his tenure, a majority in both houses, it hasn't been lost on them that their agenda was not a priority.

I saw a chart this morning which reflected that the Republicans who are the angriest with their party are most likely to support Ron Paul. Those Republicans who are less angry with their party, but nonetheless angry, are turning to Huckabee. Why aren't they turning to Romney, who promises that (despite his record) he has been transformed into a social conservative? Could it be that they think he's a phony, and they don't see it as part of their "bargain" with the monied factions of the Republican Party to pretend that he represents their interests?

George Will has joined the efforts of the monied factions of the Republican Party to depict Huckabee as a populist liberal. This isn't a new approach, and hasn't worked very well for Romney. I guess they just don't see how, when every important battle within the party is resolved in favor of what Will deems the "Madisonian" faction, it is breaking their side to get behind the one candidate they believe will actually try to put their agenda first. Or, as David Brooks puts it,

Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

And yes, that's enough to make George Will's head explode.

Emulating Huckabee?

Chris Suellentrop quotes, with apparent approval, a blogger who believes that the Democratic candidates should emulate Mike Huckabee's rhetoric:

What are the nuances I’m talking about? For one thing, as far as I know he never uses Reagan-type racist code terms like, “state’s rights”, which is code for keeping black people from voting, or “welfare queen,” which is another, racially loaded term.

Okay... so which Democrats are imitating Reagan in their use of such terms? Shouldn't this admonition in fact be directed to the other Republican nominees?

In fact I believe he is on record as saying that the major problem of the American prison system is that it is filled with people who are drug addicts, not criminals, and that instead of prison they should be in rehab. Since the majority of prisoners in American jails are persons of color, this statement is profoundly un-racist.

Where is the evidence that this message resonates with the American public? That is to say, out of the mouths of a serious contender for the Democratic nomination, or out of the mouth of Huckabee as a Republican nominee, what about it will resonate as a good idea as opposed to evidence that the speaker is "soft on crime"?

In fact, outside of a minority who recognize it as a disaster, is there any significant movement to reconsider the policies behind the "War on Drugs"? While it would be an improvement if public opinion shifted toward a more balanced approach, with addiction treated as a public health issue and a focus on the demand side of the "War on Drugs" as opposed to a continuation of failed policies directed at supply, I suspect that at present, rhetoric directed against the "War on Drugs" will hurt candidates in either party. Promises to provide funding for rehab as an alternative to jail will likely inspire to questions: "With what money," and "Why is that your priority, when there are so many other people in need?"