January 07, 2008
Noonan nails what ails Huckabee
The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan nails what ails Huckabee -- while also highlighting what he gets right in his critique of America's jaundiced national character.
Mr. Huckabee likes to head-fake people into thinking he's Gomer Pyle, but he's more like the barefoot boy of the green room. He's more James Carville than Jim Nabors.
What we have learned about Mr. Huckabee the past few months is that he's an ace entertainer with a warm, witty and compelling persona. He won with no money and little formal organization, with an evangelical network, with a folksy manner, and with the best guileless pose in modern politics. From the mail I have received the past month after criticizing him in this space, I would say his great power, the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.
They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools' squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don't admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don't need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs.
They believe that Mr. Huckabee, the minister who speaks their language, shares, down to the bone, their anxieties, concerns and beliefs. They fear that the other Republican candidates are caught up in a million smaller issues--taxing, spending, the global economy, Sunnis and Shia--and missing the central issue: again, our culture. They are populists who vote Republican, and as I have read their letters, I have felt nothing but respect.
But there are two problems. One is that while the presidency, as an office, can actually make real changes in the areas of economic and foreign policy, the federal government has a limited ability to change the culture of America. That is something conservatives used to know.
Second, I'm sorry to say it is my sense that Mr. Huckabee is not so much leading a movement as riding a wave. One senses he brilliantly discerned and pursued an underserved part of the voting demographic, and went for it. Clever fellow. To me, the tipoff was "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"
In many respects, our culture reminds me of nothing so much as an ultra-violent, ultra-decadent amalgamation of the Roman Empire and Germany's Weimar Republic -- Spartacus meets Cabaret.
Huckabee correctly focuses on the rot at (or near) the core of our society, but then acts like a classic liberal politician, promising all manner of taxpayer-funded solutions from Big Daddy Gummin't
Combine that with his seeming affection for populist class warfare and foreign policy know-nothing-ism, mix in a dash of ignorance of free-market capitalism and the favorable impact of tax cuts and reduced government spending on the economy, season with a record of pardoning and releasing killers and rapists, and you've got a toxic stew that tastes a lot like a reduced-fat version of Huey Long.
I suspect that -- like Hillary Clinton -- the more the voters get to know Huckabee, the less they'll like what they see.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 7, 2008 11:53 PM
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