DAVID BROOKS: From the Back of the Pack
Rindge, N.H.
The first thing you notice about Mike Huckabee is that he has a Mayberry name and a Jim Nabors face. But it’s quickly clear that Huckabee is as good a campaigner as anybody running for president this year. And before too long it becomes easy to come up with reasons why he might have a realistic shot at winning the Republican nomination:
First, Republican voters here and in Iowa are restless. That means that there will be sharp movements during the last 30 days toward whoever seems fresh and hot.
Second, each of the top-tier candidates makes certain parts of the party uncomfortable. Huckabee is the one candidate acceptable to all factions.
Third, Huckabee is the most normal person running for president (a trait that might come in handy in a race against Hillary Clinton). He is funny and engaging — almost impossible not to like. He has no history of flip-flopping in order to be electable. He doesn’t seem to be visibly calculating every gesture. Far from being narcissistic, he is, if anything, too neighborly to seem presidential.
Fourth, he is part of the new generation of evangelical leaders. Huckabee was a Baptist minister. But unlike the first generation of politically engaged Christian conservatives, Huckabee is not at war with mainstream America. As a teenager, he loved Jimi Hendrix, and he’s now the bass player in a rock band that has opened for Willie Nelson and Grand Funk Railroad.
Fifth, though you wouldn’t know it from the past few years, the white working class is the backbone of the G.O.P. Huckabee is most in tune with these voters.
He was the first male in his family’s history to graduate from high school. He paid his way through college by working 40 hours a week and getting a degree in two and half years. He tells audiences that the only soap his family could afford was the rough Lava soap, and that he was in college before he realized showering didn’t have to hurt. “There are people paying $150 for an exfoliation,” he jokes. “I could just hand them a bar of Lava soap.”
His policies reflect that background. At the recent Republican economic debate, he was the candidate who most vociferously argued that the current economy is not working for the middle class. As the others spoke, he thought to himself: “You guys don’t get out much. You should meet somebody who’s not handing you a $2,300 check.”
He condemns “immoral” C.E.O. salaries, and on global trade he sounds like a Democrat: “There’s no free trade without fair trade.” (Polls suggest most Republican voters are, sadly, with him on this).
Sixth, he’s a former governor. He talks about issues in a down-to-earth way that other candidates can’t match. For example, he’s got a riff on childhood obesity that rivets the attention of his audiences. He asks them to compare their own third-grade class photos with the photos of third graders today. Then he goes down the list of the diseases that afflict preteens who get Type 2 diabetes.
“The greatest challenge in health care is not universal coverage,” he argues while introducing his health care plan. “It’s universal health. A healthy country would be less expensive to cover.”
Seventh, he’s a collaborative conservative. Republicans have tended to nominate heroic candidates in the Reagan mold. Huckabee is more of an interactive leader. His Legislature in Arkansas was 90 percent Democratic, but he got enough done to be named among the nation’s top five governors by Time.
He endorses programs that are ideologically incorrect for conservatives, like his passion for arts education. He can’t understand how the argument over the size of the S-chip funding increase became an all-or-nothing holy war. He also criticizes the Bush administration for its arrogance. “There was a time when people looked up to the U.S. Now they resent us, not because we’re a superpower but because we act like one.”
Huckabee has some significant flaws as a candidate. His foreign policy thinking is thin. Some of his policy ideas seem to come off the top of his head (he vows, absurdly, to make the U.S. energy independent within eight years).
But Huckabee is something that the party needs. He is a solid conservative who is both temperamentally and substantively different from the conservatives who have led the country over the past few years.
He’s rising in the polls, especially in Iowa. His popularity with the press corps suggests he could catch a free media wave that would put him in the top tier. He deserves to be there.
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Huckabee’s Sweet Spot
By Rich Lowry
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told a gathering of social conservatives in Washington last weekend, in a boffo speech that received repeated standing ovations, that “it’s important that the language of Zion is a mother tongue and not a recently acquired second language.”
Not only is Huckabee a native speaker, he is a surpassingly silver-tongued one. By the time he finished his speech, with a stirring peroration invoking biblical underdogs beginning with David (“that little shepherd boy with five smooth stones”), the audience seemed ready to follow this presidential long shot into the lion’s den.
Huckabee’s speech had echoes of Howard Dean’s fiery call to the faithful at a Democratic National Committee meeting in 2003; to paraphrase Dean, Huckabee was saying that he’s from the social-conservative wing of social conservatism. That Huckabee has a pure social-conservative pedigree helps him in a race where none of the major candidates do, but much of his appeal is in the sheer nothing-to-lose joie de vivre of his candidacy.
Huckabee is in that golden campaign space once occupied by Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996 and by John McCain in 2000 — dark-horse candidates unencumbered by large staffs or expectations who can afford to act on gut political instincts and enjoy themselves in the process. Buchanan and McCain both were rewarded with upset victories that made them major factors in the nominating contest, and Huckabee — moving up in Iowa — could yet enjoy a similar moment.
With almost no organization, Huckabee lives off his words. In oratorical talent, he’s something of a cross between Billy Sunday and Ronald Reagan. He rose to the leadership of the Arkansas State Baptist Convention on his speaking ability. As governor, he didn’t have a speechwriter, and there was no such thing as an advanced text. His staff got reporters copies of his annual state of the state addresses by doing a quick transcription of his off-the-cuff remarks.
Huckabee shines in the verbal contests of the debates, and his wise-cracking, guitar-playing persona ingratiates him to journalists. But for all his eloquence, what Huckabee lacks, fundamentally, is a message. Unlike past long-shot crusaders like Buchanan and McCain, there is no new direction in which he wants to take the party. He has different mood music than his rivals — acknowledging middle-class anxieties and sounding nationalistic notes — but these are more rhetorical riffs than part of an integrated worldview.
“I don’t want to see our food come from China, our oil come from Saudi Arabia and our manufacturing come from Europe and Asia,” he said in his Washington speech. There is so much foolishness in that one sentence it is hard to unpack: We import a mere 3.3 percent of our food from China; we’re not going to be independent of foreign oil in 10 years as Huckabee promises; and foreign manufactured goods, by keeping prices low, are a boon to the middle class that Huckabee champions.
Lines like this are just part of Huckabee’s act — an act not in the sense of being inauthentic, but in the sense of being literally a rhetorical roadshow. Pundits now say that Huckabee has made the Republican contest a “five man” race. This is overkill. Without organization, money or an agenda, Huckabee is very unlikely to win the nomination. A presidential candidate has to be more than a performer. As one top social conservative says, “He’s not running for Toastmasters.”
But he could be running for vice president. He’s a natural fit for Rudy Giuliani. If Huckabee wins an upset in Iowa, he will deal a potentially mortal blow to Giuliani competitor Mitt Romney. If Giuliani becomes the nominee, he will have to shore up the social-conservative base. A vice-presidential nominee with impeccable social-conservative credentials will be a must, and one like Huckabee — an incredibly talented communicator with crossover appeal to the media — will be a plus.
As for Huckabee’s presidential campaign, it’s a blast. Enjoy it while it lasts.
© 2007 by King Features Syndicate
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