Mike Huckabee?  I keep thinking this has to be a joke.  Yes, I know, almost the entire 2008 election feels like one long, drawn-out, not very amusing joke, but sometimes the absurdity of the Republican race is just too much.  The only thing that would make it any more bizarre is if Tancredo were to suddenly overtake the entire field. 

Huckabee has recently skyrocketed into the lead in South Carolina, while Rasmussen has the “frontrunner” Giuliani at 12% (maybe that earlier Clemson poll wasn’t quite so unreliable after all).  Romney is stalling out.  Shall I save the country from the huckster and predict that Huckabee is going to win the nomination?  In the past, my predictions have been the kiss of death for every campaign I have touted as a winner.  No, I think I won’t make that call just yet.  Huckabee’s rise in the polls seems pretty unbelievable.  Like Giuliani’s numbers before them, they are the product of media coverage and name recognition.  I refuse to take them seriously.  No one makes such large gains in such a short span of time if the support is meaningful and enduring.  Whatever happens in Iowa and New Hampshire, it isn’t at all clear that Giuliani will be in any position to benefit from it.  That leaves the dubious options of Thompson and McCain, who seem to be trying to outdo one another in the grumpy old fogey primary.

Today has been a strange day.  The day began with Mitt Romney, which was bad enough.  (I am working on a column on the Romney/anti-Mormonism topic, so I am going to hold off on commenting on the subject for a while.)   Driving to work, I was side-swiped by a van that was dodging out of the way of one of Chicago’s many horrible taxi drivers.  Let’s just say that my car has looked better.  As I walked in to lecture this morning, the seats of the lecture hall were festooned with Ron Paul brochures (and I had nothing to do with putting them there–the Revolution flourishes at UIC on its own).  This afternoon I received an automated call from New York City telling me to apply for a Post Office job.  Apparently, the Post Office is hiring in New York right now.  I’ve heard of some pretty weird wrong numbers, but this is ridiculous.

Romney’s campaign has released some excerpts of the speech he will be giving in about an hour.  It says pretty much what many thought he would say (it is much more Millman than Fox), which is simply a more elaborate version of his standard rhetoric.  He has said that he is not a spokesman for his religion before, and he is going to tell us that again.  Here is a reason why this stance is particularly unsatisfying.  As far as the balancing act goes, the speech is better than I expected.  The reference to religious tests will probably not go down well, since the religious tests to which the Constitution refers were tests imposed through law to screen for dissenters from a formally established, official doctrine.  You cannot have a religious test without a legally established church or religion to serve as the standard for that test.  It is one thing to say that he thinks it is not a relevant or appropriate topic for political discussion.  For what it’s worth, Ron Paul takes that view.  However, whether it is relevant or not, there is no question of a religious test here.  To call this a religious test or a prelude to a religious test is to conflate a formal and legal impediment to office with the attitudes and beliefs of citizens.  It would mean that trying to elect someone you believe best represents you is a kind of persecution of the candidates you do not select, which seems like a very strange way to view things.

There is also one line (“diversity of our cultural expression”), which is effectively a nod to the “diversity is our strength” idea (an article of faith more irrational than anything taught by even the most far-out religions), that will have conservatives of various stripes smacking their foreheads.    

James Poniewozik asks the right question:

Speaking of which, why, exactly, does it constitute “bigotry” to vote against someone on the basis of their religion? Religious beliefs are relevant, strong and foundational–as political candidates never tire of reminding us. No one calls it bigotry when someone votes for a candidate explicitly because, say, he cites Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher. Yet it seems that, as a society, we’ve decided that you’re allowed to make judgments based on a candidate’s religion–but only positive ones.

This speech is an opportunity to dispel misconceptions and inform the public.  If Romney wanted this question to go away or, since it isn’t going to go away, at least to go into the background, this doesn’t seem to be the speech he ought to be giving.

This seems right:

The Huck surge makes it harder, not easier, for Rudy to win the nomination. Now that many evangelicals have a horse in this race, it would be very hard to tell them that not only will their guy not get the nomination, but they’ll have to settle for a pro-choicer.

The line that supporting Huckabee empowers Giuliani is, as I have said, one that is very convenient for Romney and his supporters, but it must also be very satisfying for the Giuliani campaign to be perceived as the beneficiary of fighting among candidates on his right.  It lends his campaign undeserved prestige and would have cemented his “national frontrunner” reputation if voter preferences hadn’t started getting in the way.  The ideal Giuliani scenario would have involved a single relatively weak social conservative candidate forcing all other contestants out early on, allowing Giuliani to knock his sole remaining major competitor out of the race and claim victory.  Instead, national and state polling (e.g., South Carolina) show that just the opposite is happening: more social conservative candidates are becoming competitive in more states, and some of them provide a ready alternative to Giuliani on national security.  At the national level, Giuliani was functioning as the default candidate with high name recognition–and his preeminence in national polling was the main source of the media’s anointing of him as the frontrunner.  Now that voters are becoming aware of other options and learning more about Giuliani, they are fleeing the latter, as the original conventional wisdom almost a year ago assumed they would.  The more competitive social conservative candidates there are, the harder Giuliani has to work to peel off evangelicals, who may be sympathetic to his dangerous ideas on foreign policy but who can find equally foolish foreign policy ideas among the pro-life candidates.  Giuliani needed to have Thompson and Huckabee go the Brownback route, which would have made Romney his chief and only real rival.  Because of the unavoidable problems Romney has with a large number of evangelicals, Giuliani could have won that scenario.  Huckabee may be terrible, but he may be preventing Giuliani’s success by returning social issues to the center of the debate.  (Of course, his cluelessness on foreign policy may make his surge very short-lived.)

While qualifying his remarks, saying that he isn’t trying to be facetious or trite (I mean, why would anyone ever say that Mike Huckabee is trite?), Huckabee seems to attribute his rise in the polls to divine intervention.  Now I understand that one should glorify God rather than oneself, but there is something a bit strange in giving this answer as the entire explanation, as if it was beside the point that he is thriving in states where there are a lot of evangelicals and struggling in states where there are few. 

I think I would find this casual invocation of God’s assistance more appropriate if Huckabee hadn’t done this in the past.  It seems to me that you can acknowledge and revere God’s sovereignty over all things and recognise that all things are ordered by His Providence, or you can choose to use Him as a prop in a comedy routine.  You don’t really get to do both.

Michael makes many of the right points about this Sarah Posner Prospect article on Huckabee, but there is more wrong with it than he says.

There is this:

While George W. Bush successfully garnered the support of the entire base by cravenly marketing himself as a “compassionate conservative,” Huckabee’s policy decisions that could actually be construed as compassionate are savaged by his conservative opposition as un-American, anti-family, and — cue the B-monster movie music — liberal. 

This contrast is not nearly as helpful to Huckabee as Posner seems to think it is.  Some of us said many of the same things when Bush was running in 1999-2000, and some conservatives were wary of the “compassion” language and the policy proposals advanced in the name of “compassion.”  Bush did not “garner the entire base” because of his “compassion” nonsense, but very much in spite of it.  It was seen by many conservatives as a necessary compromise to win the general election, but one most would have liked not to make.  When Bush began his campaign with a criticism of the House GOP for “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor,” conservatives were generally appalled, and it was only when Bush realised that he had to run right to outmaneuver McCain in the primaries that he began to sound at least a little less objectionable.  The difference was that conservatives were willing to accept the early follies of Gersonism in their desire to capture the White House, while now, in the wake of six years of “compassionate conservative” disaster, conservatives are much more willing to insist on certain standards.  In short, conservatives swallowed the tripe that Bush was a conservative for years and found themselves in 2007 having lost both power and principled positions on policy, and most are in no mood to repeat the experience.  Above all, the party base will not abide another Bush when it comes to immigration policy, and Huckabee has all the makings of one. 

Then consider part of her concluding paragraph:

It’s still to early to say whether Huckabee is truly dedicated to unraveling the conservative effort to roll Christianity, corporate sponsorship, and nativism into one package.

It’s not hard to spot the flaws in this sentence.  First of all, assuming that this is an accurate description of the Republican coalition, Huckabee wouldn’t want to unravel it, but to take control of it.  Also, “the conservative effort” can either be to bring in the “corporate sponsorship,” as she calls it, or it can be to promote so-called “nativism,” but there are hardly any conservative voters who are equally enthusiastic about both.  On the whole, the more concerned about illegal immigration you are, the more anti-corporate of a conservative you tend to be, while pro-corporate Republicans are indifferent to or in favour of illegal immigration.  Huckabee is the strangest combintion of all: a (rhetorically) anti-corporate populist who supports regressive taxation and providing governnment funding for illegal immigrants.  It is actually quite strange that anyone should find his candidacy so attractive.  His tax revisions would harm the workers about whom he supposedly cares so much, while he tries to bribe working-class voters with protectionism to cover for his support of the mass importation of cheap labour.  Almost worse than his Gersonism is the incoherence of his several policies put together.   

P.S. Here is Dave Weigel’s view on Huckabee’s appeal.

We Magyars of the world are mighty disappointed.  “Is France a country?” she asked.  Well, yes, and in France they have people who are just as ignorant about other things.

Via Stephen Pollard

Jim Antle describes the Huckabee vs. Giuliani contest by their prominent pundit boosters: Gerson v. Sager.  Put another way, it is statism married to obsequious pseudo-piety vs. militarist pseudo-libertarianism.  This is one of those contests where you hope both sides will lose.

Maybe there’s a better reason than I thought that others haven’t taken Mike Huckabee seriously on foreign policy.  It doesn’t help that the man is apparently oblivious to one of the biggest foreign policy news stories of the last year:

Kuhn: I don’t know to what extent you have been briefed or been able to take a look at the NIE report that came out yesterday …
 
Huckabee: I’m sorry?

Kuhn: The NIE report, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Have you been briefed or been able to take a look at it —

Huckabee: No.

Kuhn: Have you heard of the finding?

Huckabee: No. [bold mine DL; ed.-doesn’t he read the newspaper?]

Kuhn then summarized the NIE finding that Iran had stopped work on a clandestine nuclear program four years ago and asked if it “adjusts your view on Iran in any sense.”

Kuhn: What is your concern on Iran as of now?

Huckabee: I’ve a serious concern if they were to be  able to weaponize nuclear material, and I think we all should, mainly because the statements of Ahmadinejad are certainly not conducive to a peaceful purpose for his having it and the fear that he would in fact weaponize it and use it. (He pauses and thinks) I don’t know where the intelligence is coming from that says they have suspended the program or how credible that is versus the view that they actually are expanding it. … And I’ve heard, the last two weeks, supposed reports that they are accelerating it and it could be having a reactor in a much shorter period of time than originally been thought. [bold mine-DL; ed.-this ought to discredit him utterly, and maybe it will.]

Wow.  There goes my idea that Huckabee could exploit the NIE to demonstrate that he has the more sober, responsible approach to U.S. foreign policy.  He literally had no idea what it was or what it said.  Obviously, it’s out of the question that he would have had any idea how this might have reflected well on remarks he had made in the past.  This makes Huckabee’s rise take on a new, fairly horrifying dimension: he is wedded to Gersonism, seems to be just as clueless about foreign policy as Bush was and is, and people are starting to take a real liking to him (he now leads the Rasmussen daily tracking poll 20-17%). 

Update: Huckabee has an excuse that is almost worse than the original blunder:

I had been up about 20 hours at that time, and I had not even so much as had the opportunity to look at a newspaper. We were literally going from early in the morning until late that night and talking to guys like you. And so I had not had an opportunity to be briefed on it. There are going to be times out there on the campaign trail, Wolf – you’ve been on the trail, you know – that candidates are literally driven from one event to the next. And it would have been nice had someone been able to first say here’s some things that are going on, that are taking place. That didn’t happen. It’s going to happen again.

That’s great, except that the NIE story broke on Monday.  Essentially, Huckabee is saying that a long, gruelling day of public and media appearances prevented him from remaining informed about one of the more significant policy issues of the day.  If that is supposed to increase confidence in his ability to be President, it isn’t working.