All of us have been buying into the idea that Huckabee is actually an anti-establishment candidate, and I am particularly guilty of advancing this argument.  Huckabee has been milking this for all it’s worth, but he really isn’t any such thing.  In any oligarchic arrangement, you will have some who portray themselves as friends of “the people” and who will use the crowd as leverage against their rival oligarchs, but at no point do any of the rivals intend to change the fundamental mechanisms of power or overthrow or dismantle the establishment.  They will use and take advantage of citizens who may very well want to do just that, and their support for this or that oligarch is then used by the oligarch’s enemies as proof of the threat he poses to them, but the oligarch is simply using those people as a springboard for his ambition.  The oligarch’s enemies have mistaken the use of their own methods of manipulation for an actual revolt, or more accurately they are trying to protect their own fiefdoms within the establishment against a rival claimant and so portray the interloper as a radical departure from everything that has come before.  Huckabee wants to throw out certain members of the GOP establishment, but does not actually propose to do much of anything very differently on key policies.  Huckabee represents, in fact, a continuation and endorsement of the Bushian status quo.  Fleeing from the sinking ship of the current administration, conservative elites are not thrilled at the prospect of boarding another of similar design.

Indeed, it’s almost funny to listen to some conservatives on the topic of Huckabee. Sitting in with Greta and Shep on their caucus night coverage, no one was more negative about the former Arkansas governor than Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham. Tom Tancredo was a close third. Republicans are distancing themselves from their Iowa winner, Huckabee, and their very likely New Hampshire winner, John McCain, more than even the most loyal Hillary-ites are doing with their other choices, Obama and Edwards. ~Susan Estrich

It is funny, since most of these people were the ones who rallied about the inevitability of Bush and, when confronted with the alternnative of McCain, embraced Bush and pretended that he was one of them.  Now that they have a chance to back another Bush, they are balking and find the idea so obnoxious that it drives them into fits.  I never supported Bush and saw through him from the beginning, so it’s hardly surprising that I find Huckabee equally undesirable, but what excuse do two-time Bush voters have?  Oh, wait, let me guess–now they care about the size of government!

I’ve got Ioway in my hair!
I’ve got Ioway in my ears and eyes and nose!
Oh, I know all I owe I owe Ioway,
I owe Ioway all I owe and I know why. ~Mike Huckabee Marty, State Fair

In defense of Iowa, I would note that the record of the Iowa caucuses in selecting a Democratic nominee who goes on to become President is hard to judge.  It’s true that Iowa winners who have become the Democratic nominee (which would include every Democratic nominee since Carter) have won the Presidency only once, but then the period when there have been Iowa caucuses has been almost completely coterminous with the Reagan-Bush era.  During this era, every Democratic nominee except Clinton lost, and he’s the only nominee since 1976 who didn’t participate in the caucuses, which rigs the entire analysis against the Iowans pretty thoroughly.  (Given the overall record of Democratic nominees over the last thirty years, one might as well say that Democratic winners of the California primary are doomed to failure.)  It may be telling that the two occasions when an Iowa winner did become President have come at opposite ends of the era, as Carter unwittingly paved the way for its inauguration and Bush cluelessly presided over its end.  A Huckabee victory would provide a fitting epitaph for the era and anything good that it might have represented.  I think this must be why Huckabee gives so many establishment conservatives hives–he is the living reminder and embodiment of what Republicanism became on their watch and with their consent, and they don’t want to be reminded that they cheered on the people who brought this era to a thudding halt through misrule, ideology and corruption.  They would prefer to wish it away in a fit of Reagan nostalgia and jingoism, which are just about all the GOP has left at this point.  

Besides, there can hardly be an “Iowa curse” if an Iowa winner was elected President in two of the five open election years (1976, 2000).  A 40% success rate isn’t overwhelming, but it’s hardly proof of anything meaningful one way or the other.  Had Gary Hart gone on to become the nominee in 1984, does anyone really believe that the final outcome would have been any different?  If Obama and Huckabee do become the nominees, one of them will end up winning.  Frightening as that may be, it would probably put an end to these regular complaints about the irrelevance of Iowa.   

As for Tancredo and his supporters shellacking Huckabee, I suppose I would look a bit more kindly on all of it had they not gone over to Romney and transformed themselves overnight into some of his biggest fans.  Watching Tancredo’s former campaign manager praising Mitt Romney was such a surreal experience the other day that I thought that I must have been hallucinating.  Speaking of conversions on the road to Des Moines, Tancredo and his staffers seem to have experienced one.  Having once persecuted him, they have become Romneyites.

Not surprisingly, Bill Bradley and Gary Hart have endorsed Obama.  The “priests” of former cycles have now publicly embraced another to carry the torch.  By “priests,” I am referring to this:

Democratic professionals often describe this sorting as a competition between upscale “wine track” candidates and blue-collar “beer track” contenders. Another way to express the difference is to borrow from historian John Milton Cooper Jr.’s telling comparison of the pugnacious Theodore Roosevelt and the idealistic Woodrow Wilson. Cooper described the long rivalry between Republican Roosevelt and Democrat Wilson as a contest between a warrior and a priest. In modern times, the Democratic presidential race has usually pitted a warrior against a priest.

Some may object that 2000 does not really fit this mould, but if Gore is not really a warrior the demographics of Bradley voters support characterising him as part of the Hart-Tsongas-Dean tradition. Those who have been following the ’08 campaign for longer than any of us care to remember will recall that all this came to us by way of a Ron Brownstein piece referring to the divide between the bases of support for Obama and Clinton:

Obama’s early support is following a pattern familiar from the campaigns of other brainy liberals with cool, detached personas and messages of political reform, from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Gary Hart in 1984 to Bill Bradley in 2000. Like those predecessors, Obama is running strong with well-educated voters but demonstrating much less support among those without college degrees.

That trend may be exaggerated at the moment by the fact that Obama, a relative newcomer, is better known among better-educated voters, and it could be mitigated in the future by his potential appeal to African Americans. But it is not a pattern Obama can allow to harden. All of the candidates whose support fit that profile ultimately lost the nomination to rivals whose support was rooted in the blue-collar and minority communities where Clinton is strongest in early surveys.

Obama may be expanding his support, but he has a more fundamental problem: Democratic constituency groups expect their nominee to propose policies that do things in their interest, or at least their perceived interest, and they expect a certain degree of partisanship and brass-knuckles politicking on their behalf, while Obama’s public persona seems to reject all of that and the man seems to regard it with some distaste.      

Listening to the descriptions of supporters for Huckabee and Romney, I noted on Thursday that this same dividing line appeared on the Republican side, as Romney tended to do best with higher-income and more educated voters.  This is probably the first time since ’96 we have seen this kind of divide between Republican candidates.

Via Ross, I see that Quin Hillyer was worried about Huckabee on caucus night:

That’s why all year long I have warned people to watch Huckabee — because I knew he was a threat to win the nomination. But if he does, Susan Estrich is right: The Democrats will be dancing on inauguration night, because they will make mincemeat of this unethical, insubstantial, unconservative rube from Hope, Arkansas.

I share Mr. Hillyer’s distaste for Huckabee (though perhaps for some different reasons), but one of the reasons why Huckabee has surprised so many is that I think many of us who are observing the presidential campaign keep expecting substance, policy and reason to enter into the process.  This seems more and more to be a terrible mistake, and it seems clear now that it was always foolish to expect that.  Also, it is far from clear that an “unethical, insubstantial, unconservative rube from Hope, Arkansas” is such an obvious general election loser.  The Republicans may lose this year if they nominate Huckabee, but they are likely to lose in any case.  It is the very ephemeral and superficial quality of Huckabee’s campaign on the one hand, combined with the strong attachment different groups of activists have with him, that makes it more competitive and threatening to Democrats, who otherwise will have a monopoly on this kind of rhetoric in a year when voters are responding to it.  Criticisms of his economics have tended to take his rhetoric about class and Wall Street seriously, when closer observation reveals that, yet again, there is nothing to what he is saying.  His great “populist” appeal is, in the end, as real as Fred Thompson’s populism of driving around in a pickup truck–it is a series of symbolic cues whereby the candidate claims that he is “one of us” who intuitively “gets” what “we are going through.”  His latest along these lines is to keep saying that he thinks Americans want a President who reminds them of the guy they work with, rather than the guy who laid them off.  That’s a good line, especially if you’re running against a corporate CEO who was in the business of turning around failing companies partly by laying off employees, but it is also utterly ridiculous.  If Americans do want that, Americans are fools, but then hardly anyone was ever defeated in an election underestimating the wisdom of the Amercan public. 

Where George Bush employed his religion to create a feeling of solidarity with evangelical and conservative voters, Huckabee throws in tales of his hardscrabble youth to show that he comes “from the people” and people seem to believe it.  (The more I think about this, the more the entire Huckabee campaign reminds me of Gaius Baltar’s little manifesto against the “new aristocracy” in the third season of Battlestar Galactica, except that Huckabee’s rhetoric is far more vague.)  Huckabee refers to “fair trade” in one breath and then praises NAFTA in the next, and laments the woes of the working man as he prepares to make said working man pay a 30% consumption tax on everything he buys.  The man’s sheer lack of scruples and his ability to disarm Democratic critics by paying lip service to things they care about are, in fact, electoral gold.  Everything that makes him so undesirable and objectionable to principled conservatives is the sort of thing that probably strengthens his standing with the general public. 

Lack of substance has determined the leaders of the Republican field for the last twelve months.  Fred Thompson may be a serious, thoughtful, well-informed, albeit languid, man, but herein lies his problem: when he was little more than a celebrity candidate who made amusing YouTube videos about Michael Moore, he was king of the world among conservatives who were desperate, in their utter sentimentalism, to find “a new Reagan,” and as soon as he became a proper candidate with policy proposals he ceased to inspire much enthusiasm.  (Part of this was a result of his awful campaign style, but the pro-Thompson hysteria ended as all emotionally-driven fads must–in deep disappointment and the discovery of a new, more intriguing fad.)  Rudy Giuliani is a deadly serious maniac whose foreign policy ideas would spell disaster for our country, but his preeminence in the field stemmed entirely from vague good feelings about him as a “strong leader” derived from memories of him on 9/11.  Romney probably is the best qualified executive and manger in the field, but whatever substance the man has is so Protean in nature that no one knows what form he will take next.  He lacks substance, but in a very different way from the rest–he pretends to have deeply held principles and ideas, yet has only had these profound convictions for the duration of his presidential campaign.  The GOP field has been dominated by celebrity candidates all along, while the real candidates of substance, such as Duncan Hunter and, yes, Tommy Thompson (who was probably the best qualified of them all and therefore, naturally, among the first to drop out), have languished in total obscurity.  The truly odd phenomenon of this election is the creation of a kind of celebrity out of Ron Paul, who has achieved star status primarily on account of his policy views.  The same thing has prevailed on the Democratic side, where novelty (Obama) and familiarity/fame have determined the shape of their field since the beginning.  The vastly more qualified and prepared candidates on their side (e.g., Biden, Dodd and, I suppose, even Richardson) have gone down to humiliating and ignominious defeat.  We may very well complain about the current faddish leaders, but we need to understand that the election campaign has been driven by the media, both liberal and conservative, and focused on irrelevancies and absurdities since the beginning over a year ago. 

A good rule of thumb: if you are an informed, educated and serious person, whatever is most hateful to you is probably what the general public will prefer.  This is especially true in electoral politics, where being informed, educated and serious often blinds you to what drives and motivates 90% of the electorate.  To the extent that these folks become aware of these things at all, it is usually to dismissively declare them evidence of the irrational in politics.  But irrationality has always existed and will always exist in any human political order, and expecting anything else, as I often have done, is a great error.  Limiting the role of irrationality in politics, while desirable, is hardly possible in a mass democratic regime with an historically illiterate and media-saturated majority.  The main flaw in most of the critiques aimed specifically at Huckabee, populists, restrictionists, etc. in recent months and years is the assumption by those making these critiques that they represent the more rational position, rather than one that is equally or more irrational.

I didn’t do any post-Iowa blogging on Thursday night, since I didn’t think there was much to say at the time, but all the people going on about Obama’s speech reminded me that I wanted to say a few things about it.  It was not one of the great speeches of all time or even of the last thirty years.  Ross makes some of the necessary points.  It was a decent, even a good, speech, but it was ultimately just so much of a rehash of his Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech that still explained very little about what Obama would do.  These speeches do not, as Klein says, “elevate,” unless this is a polite way of saying that they are so hot and gaseous that they have the same effect as helium in a balloon.  Like certain gases, his words also seem to inspire feelings of giddiness in some listeners.  Klein went on:

He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.

This seems to be a very grand way of saying that he is all talk and no action.  What is remarkable about this statement, apart from the contrast that (grudgingly) concedes that Obama is not, in fact, the Logos incarnate, is that Klein thinks that this disembodied verbiage is a desirable trait in someone’s speeches.  According to this, Obama practices a sort of rhetorical docetism, epitomising the very professorial, condescending air that leaves most people cold, and this is why he inspires?  Very odd.

Catching up with the weekend commentary, I noticed that Romney recently denied that he called McCain a supporter of amnesty and then pretended not to know that one of his ads (via Ross) described McCain in just these terms.  Besides demonstrating Romney’s sheer incapacity to maintain a single view without hedging and qualifying it into oblivion, this exchange typified the dishonesty of Romney, last seen when he was lecturing people on the dictionary definition of the word “saw” rather than simply acknowledging that he had simply misspoken.  If Romney were charming and witty, he could pull off this kind of duplicity, but he isn’t and he can’t.

Finally, I’m back in Chicago after another cross-country drive, just in time for Nativity tomorrow.  Time for some accountability for my predictions.  My Iowa predictions were partly right, but I didn’t take seriously the polling showing Obama’s support increasing and I didn’t believe that so many people would actually show up for Thompson.  I put too much confidence in reports of Edwards’ organisational strength, even as I was sure that Romney’s organisation would not save him.  The second-tier Democratic candidates’ support for Obama as the preferred second-choice was also probably important in expanding Obama’s lead.  I remain convinced that Thompson is finished and McCain will not go very far beyond Michigan, but should Thompson (who has always been a kind of McCain Lite anyway) drop out and endorse McCain that might keep the latter in the running a bit longer.  Should Romney collapse entirely, McCain will become the candidate who serves as the fallback for movement institutional conservatives, while Huckabee will probably continue to surprise these same institutional conservatives with the levels of support he receives in larger states.   

I watched the debates last night in short bursts, since the Jaguars-Steelers game was far more interesting and hearing Mike Huckabee spouting off about “Islamofascism” made me want to scream.  Having seen the debates in brief, interrupted bits, I cannot gauge who performed the best overall.  My impression from what little I did see was that Romney is getting desperate, McCain is acting like the snide bully he usually is when he’s in a position of strength (which will ultimately backfire on him), Huckabee will probably do better than most of the chatterers and bloggers believe he will and Giuliani will do worse than expected (assuming that you expect Giuliani to finish third and ahead of Huckabee).  Ron Paul did well enough in Iowa that he should manage to get at least 10-12% in New Hampshire, which will be a decent showing but far less than many supporters wanted to see.  Rasmussen’s latest N.H. poll seems to confirm this and matches what I was saying last week pretty closely. 

The crosstabs in the N.H. poll do suggest that the anti-Huckabee campaign has had a damaging effect on the candidate’s chances at the nomination, as 33% of respondents (and 27% of Republicans) said they are “not very likely” or “not at all likely” to vote for Huckabee if he were the nominee, which is three times as many as said the same about Giuliani or Romney.  Among just Republicans, Giuliani and Romney fare a little worse (18 and 19% respectively are unlikely to vote for the candidate if nominated), but Huckabee remains the least attractive potential nominee for N.H. Republicans of what I suppose must be considered the top four.  (Thompson and Paul would receive even less support as the nominee from New Hampshire Republicans–among Republicans, 32% said they would be unlikely to vote for Thompson, and 44% said the same about Paul.)  For his sake, Huckabee has to hope that New Hampshire really is unrepresentative of Republican attitudes (the relative popularity of McCain seems to prove that it is).  Even so, these numbers can and probably will be used to build up an electability argument against Huckabee and in favour of McCain.  Romney’s support remains soft, as does McCain’s, with at least a third of both candidates’ supporters saying they might change their mind, but there is so little time remaining to peel away voters from either one that this may not matter.     

Rasmussen has a very different Democratic race from the polling I have been seeing this weekend and hearing on the radio, showing Obama with a commanding lead over Clinton (39-27) and a boost for Edwards (now at 18%).  If that’s right, I can see Edwards finishing very close in third place, almost validating his conceit that the race has become an Obama v. Edwards grudge match.  In reality, he will remain a nuisance until February 5 and will persist after that on the basis of decent showings in some Southern primaries, but will not be able to keep going indefinitely.  Conceivably, Clinton need not give up until after the early and mid-March primaries.  It still seems impossible to me that the Democrats will nominate Obama and proceed to march off a cliff, which is what they would be doing.  It’s true that the numbers on electability in the Rasmussen poll support the idea that Clinton is the least electable potential nominee among non-Democrats (with 30% saying they’d be unlikely to vote for her), but it is preposterous to think that the most left-wing of the three leading Democrats will, in fact, win a general election while the most “centrist” of the three is going to be a liability to her party.  The people who are so adamantly opposed to Clinton are not going to vote for the Democratic nominee in any case.  Whether or not she alienates these people is almost beside the point, and it is a strange thing for Democrats to worry about in any case.  It is as if Republicans fretted over which of their candidates most upset the Kossacks and then voted for the one that offended them the least. 

What we are seeing in intra-Democratic debates about whether Clinton is “too polarising” for the general election is really an argument about something else, and I think it mimics the fight between Goldwaterites and Rockefeller Republicans in 1964.  Inasmuch as Rockefeller represented the epitome of Me-Tooism and Goldwater represented an uncompromising, principled conservatism, Obama is playing the progressive version of Goldwater and Clinton that of Rockefeller.  Obama is a somewhat better campaigner than Goldwater, but he’s not so much better than he will overcome the resistance to his candidacy that will come from concerns about his experience, voting record, policies and, yes, his identity and race. 

Obama’s campaign represents a rebellion against the Clintons’ and the New Democrats’ power in the party establishment, and he might just succeed in taking the nomination.  It isn’t a perfect comparison, of course, but an Obama nomination would bring about a progressive electoral self-immolation somewhat like the landslide loss of 1964 (the margin of defeat would be narrower than ’64, because of the overall pro-Democratic trends in the country, but it would still be a defeat).  That might lead to a takeover of the party by Obama-ites, much as the McGovernites captured much of their party during the ’70s, or it might have a similar galvanising effect on progressives that Goldwater’s campaign had for conservatives.  More likely, ’08 will end as every previous cycle has ended for the progressive, “new ideas” candidate running against the more established pol–in defeat during the primaries.

While some late polls suggest that my Iowa predictions may be wrong, I will repeat that Edwards and Huckabee are going to win in Iowa.  Obama takes second in Iowa, while Romney, McCain and Paul trail Huckabee in that order.  McCain will win New Hampshire, and Giuliani will finish fifth behind Paul, who will be in fourth with 10-12%.  Michigan becomes a three-way contest that Romney ultimately loses.  Beyond that, I am not yet ready to make any predictions for the rest of the month.

Several things happened during my break that still merit some comment.  I was reminded of one of them by Brooks’ latest column when he wrote:

For immigration skeptics, he [Romney] swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.

Viewed as a purely tactical anti-Huckabee and anti-McCain move, I can understand why Tancredo did this, but when I first heard about it I was amazed.  Even though I understand why he endorsed Romney, it still strikes me as a bizarre move.  Tancredo is obviously identified with opposition to mass immigration, and more than any of the “second tier” candidates made a point of criticising leading candidates for their opportunism on immigration and their conversions “on the road to Des Moines.”  No one better embodies the “conversion on the road to Des Moines” than Romney, and no one is less credible in his criticisms of other candidates for their weaknesses on immigration policy.  The most ardent opponent of amnesty has now shown his approval of a candidate who represents everything about the marriage of Republicanism and corporate interests that Tancredo rejects.  It is a strange and inexplicable endorsement, perhaps even more so than Gilchrist’s endorsement of Huckabee, and could conceivably mean the difference between victory for the huckster or triumph for the fraud on Thursday.  Endorsing either Thompson or Paul would have made sense, and could have given Paul a needed boost in early contests.  Instead, Romney the venture capitalist gets the backing of the foremost elected restrictionist in the country in yet another bad bargain with the candidate of the GOP establishment.  Short of endorsing McCain or Giuliani, nothing could have put Tancredo more out of step with restrictionist voters. 

P.S.  Incidentally, I also agree with Brooks that Romney’s by-the-book approach to the nomination will, if successful, lead to general election defeat for the Republicans.  Weighed down by the war and deeply unpopular across the board, the GOP also has to be able to compete with the Democrats in states where voters view globalisation and free trade with skepticism at best, and Romney adopting the role of a cardboard-cutout “full-spectrum conservative,” when he has no real credibility on at least two of the three “legs” of the “stool” he frequently mentions, is not going to do the trick.  The GOP might very well lose no matter which candidate they select, but they will definitely lose with Romney.

Happy New Year!  As of last week, Eunomia entered its third year.  There are many people who made this past year a success in blogging and writing, and there are more than I can name, but I would like to thank everyone at The American Conservative, Chronicles, Antiwar, Taki’s Top Drawerand ISI in particular for their great support and encouragement, especially my long-suffering editors.  Thanks also to Reihan and the large assembly of talented writers at The American Scene, as well as my excellent colleagues at Cliopatria and What’s Wrong With the World for putting up with me.