Mike Huckabee’s going to run for president. He quit his Fox News show, which I guess is as good a sign of any these days that a Republican politician aspires to become leader of the most powerful nation on the planet.

But he’s running to burnish his brand, not to actually become president. How do I know this? Nobody who wants to be president of anything but Duck Dynasty America publishes a campaign book with the title of, God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy. Its shtick — and I say that as a fan of God, guns, grits, gravy, and Mike Huckabee.

Back in ’08, when he was running for president, I counted myself a backer in the GOP primaries. I was (and am) eager to see a socially conservative, economic populist be the Republican standard bearer. And I hated the elitist disdain with which the Republican establishment treated Huckabee. And Huckabee loves Keith Richards, which if you ask me, ought to be a requirement for all American presidents.

Alas, someone who used to work for Huckabee contacted me to say that I’m way off base, expecting Huck to be a Christian philosopher-king. He’s a good guy, the political operative said, but he just doesn’t have what it takes to be president.

I didn’t want to believe it, but discovering via Amazon.com that Huckabee is really running for commissioner of Kornfield Kounty brought it to mind. Dang. Pete Spiliakos says Huck seems to be trying to be the Republican version of Jesse Jackson. Excerpt:

In the 2012 cycle, we saw multiple Republican candidates surge in the polls and then crash. Huckabee would enter with a larger reservoir of goodwill than any of those 2012 candidates. But the truth is that Huckabee often has offered his own bad ideas, no ideas, or the establishment’s bad ideas. If Huckabee chooses to run an identity politics campaign and retains the lion’s share of evangelical support, then the victory of the Republican establishment is virtually assured.

A populist conservative politics that wins over Huckabee-inclined voters will have to be careful, patient, and thoughtful. It will have to acknowledge where Huckabee is right in diagnoses while pointing out the ways that Huckabee has been wrong in his prescriptions. Even more, a populist conservatism will have to offer real solutions for voters who have been let down by the establishments of both parties—and by Mike Huckabee.

UPDATE: Edward Hamilton says:

My intense desire to bring a contrarian perspective and disrupt bandwagon analysis must be coming to the front again, because I feel like the comments here need a dose of balance. The problem isn’t so much that Huckabee is a wonderful person and everyone is being too mean to him. It’s that he’s the kind of person that a populist upwelling will almost certainly rally around if it ever does occur, and anyone who self-identifies in a cultural way with populist America is going to need to downgrade expectations to the point of tolerating a certain amount of Huckabee’s cultural posturing. There’s simply not a sufficiently wide demographic base for ideologically pure economic and cultural populism that doesn’t embrace its own tribal identity in this kind of non-ironic way.

There’s a certain analogy here between populist intellectual principles and the sort of Bush administration idealism that led to excessively optimistic predictions of the post-war situation in Iraq. “Democracy” in the Middle East was always going to necessarily be an aggregation of the typical Muslim’s perspectives, rather than the perspectives of a handful of Western educated Iraqi elites with the political skill to credibly promise a liberal post-war regime. And American populism is always going to resemble an aggregation of the average views of a lot of Southern whites who enjoy their tribal identity and derive great satisfaction in seeing it vigorously represented in the public sphere as something other than an object of ridicule. It’s hard to own populism as a cause without also reconciling yourself to the people who define it.

You can get angry about the hollowness of the message when it really is hollow, and maybe Huckabee is a shade hollower than a randomly selected representative of populism ought to be. Or maybe he’s just an utterly conventional, bog-standard example of what populism will always evolve into, once it gets off the front porch and tries to march in a few parades. If there were a dozen Atticus Finch clones waiting in the foyer to claim his mantle, I’d be more inclined to politely punt him off the nearest pier. But in the current political order, I want to see someone acting as a gentle, good-humored advocate for Southern evangelicals, to make them feel as though they’re something other than the useful idiots of the Republican world. Huckabee isn’t a demagogue or a spittle-frother, and he has a resume that reflects some amount of practical political skill. Is that too low a bar to entitle him to respect? Not for someone who’s read the last few hundred years of American and European history. I don’t think Huckabee or anyone else is a philosopher-king these days, but I do think he’s a guy with his heart in the right place.

In my mind, the best thing about Huckabee isn’t his enemies on the Left, but his enemies on the Right. Every time I read some Cornerite at NRO denouncing him as a closet socialist who ran afoul of the Club for Growth (*gasp*) and actually raised taxes as a governor (*double gasp*), I feel a little better about him. He disrupts a narrative of seamless purity on some issues that are hobbling the GOP, and that’s a virtuous service to provide.