Now, That Opportunity Is Lost

Tim Stanley writes:

Mike Huckabee has written himself out of the presidential race. This is bad news for the Republicans and bad news for American voters. While the liberal and European media always painted Huckabee as an evangelical nut, the truth is that he’s really an old-fashioned Southern huckster of the most likeable and moderate variety. The GOP may have just lost its most credible, human candidate.

The case against Huckabee was that he complied with every American Right-wing stereotype going. Born in the same Arkansas town that produced Bill Clinton, the teetotal Mr Huckabee preached his first sermon at 15 and was married by 19. He pursued a career in Christian Broadcasting and rose to be president of a religious TV station. He was elected lieutenant governor of Arkansas in 1993 and became governor in 1996 when the incumbent was convicted of fraud. When the governor’s mansion was redecorated in 2000, Huckabee’s family lived in a trailer parked on the front lawn. He ran well for president in 2008 by appealing to the GOP’s religiously conservative base. He was adamantly pro-life and anti-gay marriage, and he gave hypnotically vague answers on the origins of man. His reputation for wheeling-and-dealing earned him the sobriquet “The Huckster”.

But Huckabee’s redneck image was the very reason why he did so well in 2008. His genuine experience of poverty struck a chord with middle-class families struggling in an era of recession. He loved telling crowds that growing up he was forced to use cheap, itchy soap. “It wasn’t until I went to college,” he said, “that I realised showers are not supposed to hurt.” He played bass guitar and looked comfortable in jeans. Best of all, he fought a public battle against his waistline. Huckabee found a way of blending politics and lifestyle entertainment that gave him a unique rapport with ordinary voters – you’ve got to love a politician who can write a bestseller with a title like Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork. He followed this up with a collection of Christmas stories and a chat-show.

Huckabee was a presidential candidate pitched for the Oprah Winfrey generation. He is a conservative, but – unlike most conservatives – he doesn’t seem angry about it. The average rightwing politician comes across a little primal. Michele Bachmann doesn’t blink and Rush Limbaugh probably eats liberals for breakfast. In contrast, Huckabee has always defused partisan tensions with wit. Watch the beautiful way he answered this pointed question about evolution in 2008. Any other conservative would have responded to the challenge with fury or a Biblical testament. The Huckster brought things to the basics of what makes life worthwhile: God loves us, man is at the centre of His universe, and that’s why we have to learn to get along.

But beyond all the poetry, Huckabee was a frontrunner because he boasted surprising credentials as a moderate. In fact, it’s why some ideologues hated him. As governor, he raised taxes to plug a hole in the education budget, established a system of health-insurance for kids not dissimilar to Obamacare and refused to veto college funds for the children of illegal immigrants. His record on race is exemplary: in the 1980s he encouraged his own church to integrate and, as governor, he declared 1997 a year of racial reconciliation. In sum, Huckabee is less a Republican than he is an old-fashioned Southern populist in the Huey Long, Big Jim Folsom mold.

Yet this is probably the key reason why Huckabee didn’t run. His image as a “nice guy” could have been subverted by another presidential campaign. The central tragedy of American politics is that the nomination system abhors a rational, pragmatic human being. It demands that candidates appeal to the extremes of the political spectrum. While in Europe everything cleaves to the middle, in America it’s the radical Left and Right that attracts the money and manpower. Huckabee was above that.

Many liberals will celebrate The Huckster’s decision. They should not. Huckabee’s populism could have integrated evangelicals into the middle-ground, mainstream of political thinking. For the last thirty years, they’ve been wedded to fiscal conservatives like Newt Gingrich because those were the only people prepared to push their family-friendly agenda. But evangelicals are far more socially conscious than this pact suggests – see Pat Robertson’s campaign against global warming as an example. Huckabee offered a new alliance between social conservatism and economic populism, deprogrammed of racist nonsense and rooted in Middle Americana. Now, that opportunity is lost. We can expect the Republican primaries to be a far shriller and more immoderate place without The Huckster’s presence.