2008: GOP Hopes Hang on Huckabee

I have been saying for some months that there is only one likely Republican nominee: the Other Man from Hope.

Christian conservatives are not alone in feeling uncomfortable with the idea of a president who is a practicing Mormon, and Mitt Romney's prospects are not enhanced by the image he has contrived of a man with no ideas or beliefs that aren't fungible, that, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there is no there there. And, the polls notwithstanding, the prospect that the ethically challenged, socially moderate, thrice-married, cross-dressing, one-issue Rudy Giuliani would be the GOP candidate, while entertaining, was preposterous. But if not the cult member from Massachusetts nor the whacko from New York, then who? The John McCain of 2000 would have mowed down this year's stunted crop of Republican presidential wannabes, but the latter McCain is too compromised, too burdened by his support of Bush's occupation of Iraq, and probably too old, to seize the prize.

Unlike the Democrats, any one of whom would make a credible candidate, the only Republicans willing to waste their time trying to live down George W. Bush's record are, with one exception, third rate back-benchers (Tom Tancredo) and ideologues (Ron Paul). The exception, of course, is Mike Huckabee, an out-of-work former governor who had everything needed to be a viable candidate -- a modest, unassuming personality, an engaging wit, a natural constituency within his party, a moderate record in office (he actually may be that elusive political Bigfoot, the heretofore chimerical compassionate conservative) -- except money. The inadequacies of the three major candidates encouraged Republicans to forage elsewhere for a leader -- thus the under-amped entrance by Fred Thompson, but there was really nobody else to lead the band than the bass-playing former minister from Arkansas.

Huckabee, despite his new poll numbers, doesn't have a lock on the nomination, though. He's still way behind in the money game, although their are signs that he is enjoying a fund-raising surge. His lack of foreign policy experience is a liability. The party's anti-tax ideologues think he's a closet New Dealer. There are political skeletons in his armoire, including a Willie Horton-ish case of a gubernatorial pardon gone bad (parenthetically, I find it painful to watch progressives gleefully deploying the same techniques against Huckabee that the perfidious George H.W. Bush campaign used to smear the admirable Mike Dukakis -- surely it would be better politics to decry Huckabee's inexperience and discredit his off-the-wall economic ideas -- among other things, he'd replace the progressive income tax with a national sales tax -- than to further legitimize gutter politics). And Romney isn't out of the race -- most of Huckabee's surge has come from Giuliani, whose candidacy has begun to circle the bowl.

But as I argued a couple of months ago (Déjà vu all over again?), this agonizingly protracted and criminally costly nominating process will have been worth enduring if it comes down at last to a contest between John Edwards and Mike Huckabee, with vice presidential candidates of the caliber of, say, Bill Richardson and Chuck Hagel. Such a competition would be issues-oriented and civil out of all proportion to our custom, with the voter permitted to choose between clear and contrasting visions of the nation's future, both -- surprising in itself -- focused in their way on making the American Dream available to everyone. In contrast, a brawl between Hillary Clinton and Giuliani/Romney, I fear, would be muddled and brutish in the manner to which we are so painfully habituated, with an outcome unlikely to disturb the rest of even the lightest sleeper in the luxuriant bed of the status quo.

An Edwards-Huckabee match would also discourage New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, from declaring (not necessarily a good thing: the mayor in his own way can be relied on to lay a soothing hand on the fevered brow of our politics), since a contest between between candidates of modest mien and low negatives would make it unlikely his independent run could exceed that of a Ross Perot-style spoiler.

Be sure to read Frank Rich's The Republicans Find Their Obama in yesterday's New York Times for a fuller discussion of the Huckabee phenomenon.
See also, New poll shows big shake-up in GOP race (CNN, 2007-12-10)