Huckabee's Awkward Moment Explained...Sort Of

As Iowa's caucuses are obscenely early - Iowa 3rd - New Year's and Christmas were both fair game for candidates. Yesterday's headlines were generally banal, until Mike Huckabee's press conference to unveil a negative ad which he refused to air but would still show to reporters. Sound contrived to anyone else? The press knew absurdity when they saw it, and guffawed at the former governor's contortions.

Now he's on FNC's Hannity and Colmes, and attempting to explain away yesterday's event. His excuse? He wanted the media to know he had it, that he wasn't just blowing smoke. BS. I'm no Huckabee supporter, far from it, but I'd call foul against any candidate this stupid. Perhaps Huckabee honestly wanted to keep this thing under wraps, in which case he screwed up; if his goal was to show his hand without the appearance of a true negative attack, it really was a ham-handed effort.

Ron Fournier's perspective, given his long career as an observer, is worth reading.

Dispatch from the Huckabus

Yes, Mike Huckabee calls his vehicle the Huckabus. And the Weekly Standard's Terry Eastland is aboard, discussing Huckabee's increasingly strident populism in an insightful article that's well worth reading.

Though neither would ever admit it, I see a lot in common (at least politically) between John Edwards and Huckabee. Both are smooth-talking Southerners, though while Huckabee was trying to convert the masses, Edwards was focused merely on a jury; both have to some degree repudiated the Bush administration's foreign policy, and espoused one of their own that is fundamentally naive. Both are playing to their party's core constituencies, though Huckabee is doing so with far more success than his Democratic counterpart. And most notably, both are espousing populist politics in increasingly aggressive tones. Both the parallels here are interesting - Edwards' conversion to Marxist rhetoric has been a matter of desperation; this wasn't so obviously his schtick in 2004. Huckabee, however, has embraced this air of "grievance" as he's risen in the polls - for him its opportunism. As Eastland points out, he's positioning himself against Romney both socially and economically, and doing both succesfully. Eastland goes so far as to suggest that the Huckabee campaign is attempting to realign the Republican Party (perhaps much the same way that Tancredo's one-trick pony campaign did with immigration).

To me, this effort is another reason to hate Huckabee. For years now, Republicans have largely had Democrats on the defensive economically - sure they still advocated stupid policies, but they were at least in favor of tax cuts; they'd conceded much of the economic middle ground to the GOP. A realignment such as Huckabee apparently envisions would do exactly the opposite - if populism became the order of the day, Republicans would be at a serious disadvantage to Democrats, whose constituencies are more universally in support of this. In contrast, a Republican nominee spouting populist trash would have to wage an intra-party civil war
to do so. Bottom-line: Huckabee's populism isn't just stupid (and bad economic policy), it's damaging long-term; as always, fear the law of unintended consequences.

UPDATE: Politico's Jonathan Martin has an interesting piece this morning situating Huckabee as the latest in a long line of Republican incumbents, including Robertson, Buchanan, and McCain. I don't know if I agree with all of it, especially the McCain part, however the second page is worth reading for the fervent religiosity that pervades Huckabee campaign stops, "polling data come alive," in Martin's words.

UPDATE 2: An interesting evangelical critique of Huckabee, thus meriting a religion tag on this post.