While I make no bones about my dislike of Mike Huckabee as a candidate, things like this are why Huckabee has gone from the bottom tier to the top so quickly:
It’s simply, folksy, and puts Huckabee above the fray. Rich Lowry sees a hidden strategy behind the ad, and I’m inclined to agree. This was a brilliant political move for Huckabee.
The fact is, however, that Mike Huckabee doesn’t have the policy chops to be President. However, you can bet that he will be the leader for Evangelical Republicans for some time in the future. He does represent a critical sector of the Republican base, and while his appeal to evangelicals won’t get him to the White House, it does give him a lot of power in the Republican Party. A Mike Huckabee that gets a few years of political and foreign policy experience as Vice President could be a potent force in the future.
The Weekly Standard is reporting that Sen. Joe Lieberman will endorse John McCain tomorrow morning. No doubt this will throw the Democrats into paroxysms. Then again, the way they treated Lieberman, it’s unlikely that he would endorse anyone on the Democratic side.
The big question is what this means for McCain. He has the backing of the Des Moines Register and the New Hampshire Union-Leader—which may help him, but it also tends to remind Republicans that he’s the media’s favorite Republican. That doesn’t help him all that much.
Still, McCain was widely seen as out of the race this summer, and now he’s in a position to surprise us all. The best position to be in is the “anyone-but-Huck” camp, and Romney, McCain and Thompson are all in the running for that position. (The other big story is the collapse of Rudy Giuliani’s campaign—although it’s far too early to call him done.) When it comes to the war, McCain is one of the strongest advocates for victory and can claim that he was right about the failures of the Rumsfeld era. When it comes to economic issues, McCain is one of the strongest fiscal conservatives and one of the best position candidates on pork. On social issues, McCain has a solidly pro-life record.
The albatross around McCain’s neck is immigration, but if he can push forward a plan that makes anything looking like amnesty as a distant second to securing the borders that may help him. Indeed, that’s exactly the strategy that McCain has been pushing for a while now.
This race is wide open right now. McCain could be one of the beneficiaries of a race in which any candidate could have an opening. The fact that he can get things pushed through a hostile Congress may work to his advantage, especially in the general election.
In 2003, the Democrats went with “electability” as their mantra. While Kerry was a weak candidate, McCain is not. McCain has the benefit of giving the GOP a real shot at picking up a sizable percentage of independent voters, and he’s right on most of the key issues, and persuadable on the others. McCain has some real momentum behind him now, and as 2003 demonstrated, the guy who’s languishing in the single digits can become the frontrunner overnight…
The essay is a great symbol of Huckabee’s campaign — there are feints in interesting directions, but in the end it’s just a grab-bag of contradictory ideas.
In a New York Times Magazine profile, Huckabee mentions columnist Thomas Friedman and new sovereigntist Frank Gaffney as his foreign policy influences. Those in the know might believe this to be impossible, but Huckabee’s Foreign Affairs essay really is an attempt to mix these two together in some kind of unholy alchemy.
The more one looks at Huckabee the less substance there seems to be. If this guy gets the nomination, it’s lights out for the GOP’s chances in 2008. No wonder the Democrats are pushing for him—he’s the one candidate that makes Obama seem prepared. (A Huckabee-Obama race would be the most vapid Presidential contest in recent history.) His appeal is that he’s a good-old-boy Evangelical, which is enough for about 25% of the GOP electorate, but not enough to win the White House. It won’t even be close.
Thankfully, I don’t think Huck will make it through the nomination process. He’s peaked too early, and now people are asking questions about his record. The Wayne DuMond pardon is just the tip of the iceberg for Huckabee. You can’t be a governor of Arkansas without a few skeletons in your closet, and Huckabee is no exception to that rule.
Huckabee is not Presidential material. He may be a nice guy, he may be a devout Christian, and he may be the sort of person you’d like to have a beer with, but that doesn’t make him someone who could face down Ahmadinejad or work with Congress on solving our Social Security problems. Republican primary voters need to think about which candidate can actually use the bully pulpit of the Presidency to advance conservative ideas—and that will mean working with a hostile Congress and trying to advance American values in an increasingly hostile world. Huckabee’s vapid piece in Foreign Policy demonstrates that not only is Huckabee unprepared, but he possesses a naïvete that is downright dangerous. The GOP can do better than that, and hopefully they will.
UPDATE: Even Andrew Sullivan gets in on the act. He’s right, though. Huckabee’s statement basically consisted of throwing out the names of two foreign policy theorists that Huckabee could recall off the top of his head, not even realizing that the two stand for essentially opposite concepts of American foreign policy.
Fred Thompson is getting some good reviews of his debate performance this afternoon, while the Des Moines Register (or as we used to call it “The Locust Street Liar”) is getting hammered for running a joke of a debate. The former Senator got a couple of good shots in, most notably when he went after the idiocy of the debate format:
Note the focus meters going through the roof—if Thompson can connect like that more often this race could get very interesting.
Thompson could easily come in a strong third in Iowa, which gives him some room in the key contests in South Carolina and Florida. This race is very much up in the air, and Romney, McCain, Giuliani, Thompson and Huckabee all have paths to the nomination. Again, look at how the actual results in Iowa confounded the pollsters in 2003—expect that something similar could result this year as well.
In all seriousness, even if Huckabee meant that we should switch to all renewable sources within a decade, it’s still a silly argument. Even if you try to make sense of the statement, there’s just no way it doesn’t come off as being silly. We need a President who actually understands basic issues of policy. Mike Huckabee constantly comes off as someone who is clueless about the world around him.
Gaffes like this, and his statements which either sly anti-Mormon innuendos or signs he slept through his comparative theology classes demonstrate why Huckabee isn’t ready for prime time. He will probably win Iowa, but the reality is that Mike Huckabee is not a strong candidate, he’s not a conservative, and if he gets the nomination Hillary Clinton might as well start picking out drapes for the Oval Office. The Democrats have been holding their fire against him for months now because they know damned well that Mike Huckabee is a carbon copy of George W. Bush with all the same faults. He’s the sort of guy you want to have a beer with, but he would be a lousy President and his instincts are dead wrong on key issues.
Huckabee is a rising star, but his star will fall just as fast when Republican voters realize that he’s simply unready for the job. His appeal is understandable, but it’s all skin deep. Sooner or later Huckabee will crash, and when he does it will be a hard crash—in this race, Huckabee is playing the role of Howard Dean, and while he has some strong support, at the end of the day he is not electable and Republican primary voters need a candidate who can stand up to Hillary Clinton. Mike Huckabee is not that candidate.
Like any Republican, he would have an uphill climb next fall. But he would be able to offer a persuasive outsider’s critique of Washington. His conservative accomplishments as governor showed that he can work with, and resist, a Democratic legislature. He knows that not every feature of the health-care plan he enacted in Massachusetts should be replicated nationally, but he can also speak with more authority than any of the other Republican candidates about this pressing issue. He would also have credibility on the economy, given his success as a businessman and a manager of the Olympics.
Romney has some impressive achievements under his belt, but the big question is even if he’s the most reliably conservative candidate (which is debatable), can he actually win in the general election? The essential problem that Mitt Romney has is that he’s too packaged to really connect with the electorate. The victories he’s had have come from spending a lot of money to get his message out, but the rise of Mike Huckabee proves that he hasn’t done nearly a good enough job of closing the deal with Republicans no less the American electorate.
National Review’s endorsement is a big win for Romney at a time he urgently needs one. However, if he doesn’t beat Huckabee in Iowa and loses New Hampshire, he’s out of the race. He hasn’t built the nationwide campaign and instead has pursued then then-wise strategy of building momentum from the early contests. If that strategy fails, it’s going to be increasingly hard to find a Plan B.
All in all, the GOP could do much worse than Romney, but he needs to show he can connect and he needs to demonstrate a sincere commitment to conservative principles, both on economic and social issues. His heart is in the right place—at least for now—but it remains to be seen whether he’ll stick to his principles should he be elected.
The poll, conducted December 6-9, involved nationwide telephone interviews with 377 registered Republicans voters or independent voters who lean Republican.
Let’s count the number of problems with this poll:
The poll has only 377 respondents for a supposedly national poll. That’s a very low number of respondents and not a large enough sample to be statistically significant.
The poll includes independents who “lean Republican.” Exactly what does that term mean. Are they strongly Republican? Moderately Republican? Sorta-kinda Republicanish?
For that matter, how many voters who “lean Republican” would actually vote in a Republican primary? If you’re sampling a group of people who aren’t likely to vote in a GOP primary then your sample isn’t representative of the real shape of that contest.
The poll was conducted over a weekend. How many people care to spend time answering a pollsters questions on a weekend? Especially if you’re polling Republicans, who tend more often than not to be churchgoers, weekend polling tends to depress results. (Which may explain why the Democratic sample was 467 voters compared to the 377 Republicans sampled.)
The margin of error was 5 points, which is very significant when you’re dealing with so many candidates separated by such small margins.
Here’s the problem: polling at this stage in the race is worthless. You have to find the voters who A) actually care about the race at this point in time and B) actually have a reasonable chance of voting in a primary. That’s a crapshoot, which is why these polls have less than 500 respondents in their samples. That’s not enough to make a statistically meaningful measure, and when you factor in all the other problems you get a result that doesn’t say a whole lot.
It seems likely that Huckabee is doing very well. It could also be that the polls are worthless. As a case in point, look back to a snapshot of the Democratic race at this point in 2003.It’s interesting how much the 2007 Republican race resembled the 2003 Democratic race. None of the candidates had found their niche. There was talk of a brokered convention. The field was entirely up on the air. The primary schedule had been compressed which gave less time for a slow build as in past races. John Kerry was at 4%. He was polling behind Al Sharpton. Howard Dean was unstoppable. He had the organization, he had a group of supporters that were fired up, and he was cruising towards the nomination. By the end of Iowa, Howard Dean was toast and it was John Kerry cruising towards victory.
Could history repeat itself? Will the 2008 GOP race follow the dynamics of the 2004 Democratic race? Who is going to take the role of John Kerry? Will it be Fred Thompson, John McCain, or will Duncan Hunter suddenly rise through the ranks to take the nomination out of nowhere? (OK, so that last one isn’t going to happen.)
I have no clue, and neither do the pollsters. As much as we’d all love to know how things play out, the race is changing too fast for the polls to have much meaning. The polls give the campaigns some ammo, but if you really want to know what’s going on they’re about as good as reading tea leaves.