Larison, on why he won't vote for Mike Huckabee:
Each time I am inclined to cheer him on as an anti-establishment candidate, I have to remind myself that he really isn’t any such thing. Despite my willingness to give his statements the benefit of the doubt, I have tried to do this in the interests of accuracy and fairness to what he has actually said, but on no account do I want this man to be President. No doubt, some of his supporters read Crunchy Cons and like what they find, some of them could be part of those Middle American Radicals Sam Francis described long ago, and many of them are probably the people Ross and Reihan are describing in their forthcoming book, but this is exactly what is wrong with Huckabee’s candidacy. He draws in these people from these three very different parts of the population and relies on them for his political success, but I have no confidence that he would govern in their interests or according to their views. It’s the same con that Bush used against evangelicals and social conservatives. Because he could claim plausibly enough that he was “one of them,” he felt that he owed them nothing and could take them for granted, and by and large they allowed this to happen and happily re-elected him anyway. Now there is the hope that Huckabee is really “one of them” and will really govern in their interests, because he once said some mean things about Wall Street, but he won’t. In order for politicians to dupe you, you must be willing to be duped.This is what Huckabee is doing, just as Bush did before, and I’m afraid people are falling for it all over again.
I, too, have my doubts as to whether a President Huckabee would govern in the interests of the working-class constituency Reihan and I have in mind, but I think the comparison to George W. Bush is somewhat dubious. Yes, like Huckabee, Bush has made rhetorical gestures toward a more working-class friendly conservatism, and like Huckabee he has played on identity politics to shore up his support among evangelicals specifically, and "Red America" more broadly. But the differences between the two are enormous. George W. Bush is a preppy blueblood whose candidacy had the blessing of both movement conservatives and the Republican Old Guard; Mike Huckabee is a working-class Arkansan whose primary-season insurgency has exactly zero institutional support. George W. Bush had Dick Cheney and Karl Rove whispering in his ear; Huckabee has, well ... Ed Rollins and Jim Pinkerton. It's next-to-impossible to imagine Bush saying the sort of things Huckabee has said about Wall Street Republicans and the Club for Growth; it's next-to-impossible to imagine him delivering the speech that Huckabee delivered at the Values Voter Summit. And it's absolutely impossible, to take a pair of issues near to Larison's heart, to imagine Bush adopting the Krikorian Plan as his immigration policy, or delivering the following remarks on foreign policy:
Again, none of this means that a Huckabee Presidency wouldn't be an enormous disappointment to any dissident conservatives who rally around him - particularly dissidents of the crunchy and paleo variety. But it would probably disappoint in different ways, and for different reasons, than the presidency of George W. Bush.
Update: Larison, unsurprisingly, remains unconvinced.
But Ross, none of that deals with policy. There is nothing-- absolutely nothing-- that Huckabee has proposed that would address Sam's Club Republicans.
Politics isn't just theater.
Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | January 14, 2008 3:34 PM