Mike Huckabee: America's Tribune

There is a reason for the recent Huffington Post attack on Mike Huckabee--professional Democrats are frightened by what they are seeing in the comment threads of left-leaning blogs. As one travels the political blogosphere it is very common to read statements like the following, "I'm a Democrat, I've always voted for Democrats, but I might vote for Huckabee this time around." Grassroots Democrats and Independents are voicing their intention to cross over to Huckabee.

Why the unrestrained excitement for Huckabee in sectors usually very committed to partisan politics? One reason is that "Huckabee is just that good." Consider the following quote taken from the recent Time cover article on Huckabee,

In the summer before his senior year, Huckabee's affable manner and quick wit (he's blessed with a stand-up's sense of timing) helped win him a coveted spot at Boys State, the young-leaders camp that Bill Clinton also attended. Huckabee ran for governor, the camp's top office, and won easily. "When I heard him speak, I knew that I didn't have a chance," says Rick Caldwell, who ran against him then. "I even voted for him. He was that good."

However, there is much more to it than political prowess. Like usual, Frank Rich's New York Times article The Republican Find Their Obama is full of factual inaccuracies (can't the NY Times afford a fact-checker, or for that matter a college intern to do Rich's research for him). However, in this article Rich shows he has a better grasp on why Huckabee is succeeding than do the vast majority of Beltway talking heads. Consider this excerpt:

It sounds preposterous, but Washington’s shock over Mike Huckabee’s sudden rise in the polls — he “came from nowhere,” Robert Novak huffed last week — makes you wonder. Having failed to anticipate so much else, including the Barack Obama polling surge of days earlier, the press pack has proved an unreliable guide to election 2008. What the Beltway calls unthinkable today keeps turning out to be front-page news tomorrow.

The prevailing Huckabee narrative maintains that he’s benefiting strictly from the loyalty of the religious right. Evangelical Christians are belatedly rallying around one of their own, a Baptist preacher, rather than settling for a Mormon who until recently supported abortion rights or a thrice-married New Yorker who still does. But that doesn’t explain Mr. Huckabee’s abrupt ascent to first place in some polling nationwide, where Christian conservatives account for a far smaller slice of the Republican pie than in Iowa. Indeed, this theory doesn’t entirely explain Mr. Huckabee’s steep rise in Iowa, where Mitt Romney has outspent him 20 to 1, a financial advantage that Mr. Romney leveraged to crush him in the state’s straw poll just four months ago.

What really may be going on here is a mirror image of the phenomenon that has upended Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability” among Democrats. Like Senator Obama, Mr. Huckabee is the youngest in his party’s field. (At 52, he’s also younger than every Democratic contender except Mr. Obama, who is 46.) Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines. Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.

Though their views on issues are often antithetical, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Obama may be united in catching the wave of an emerging zeitgeist that is larger than either party’s ideology. An exhausted and disillusioned public may be ready for a replay of the New Frontier pitch of 1960. That pitch won’t come from Mr. Romney, a glib salesman who seems a dead ringer for Don Draper, a Madison Avenue ad man of no known core convictions who works on the Nixon campaign in the TV series, “Mad Men.” Mr. Romney’s effort to channel J.F.K. last week, in which he mentioned the word Mormon exactly once, was hardly a profile in courage.

The fact to remember about Mr. Huckabee’s polling spike is that it occurred just after the G.O.P. YouTube debate on CNN, where Mr. Romney and Rudy Giuliani vied to spray the most spittle at illegal immigrants. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, the fringe candidate whose most recent ads accuse the invading hordes of “pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives,” accurately accused his opponents of trying to “out-Tancredo Tancredo.”

Next to this mean-spiritedness, Mr. Huckabee’s tone leapt off the screen. Attacked by Mr. Romney for supporting an Arkansas program aiding the children of illegal immigrants, he replied, “In all due respect, we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.” It was a winning moment, politically as well as morally. And a no-brainer at that. Given that Mr. Tancredo polls at 4 percent among Iowan Republicans and zero nationally, it’s hard to see why Rudy-Romney thought it was smart to try to out-Tancredo Tancredo.

In addition to Huckabee's authenticity and integrity, there are also a large number of people who appreciate his stand on the issues. However, according to the Beltway talking heads and the media elite the real reason that Huckabee is soaring in polls nationally is that all of his supporters are just Bible-thumping, Confederate flag waving, cousin marrying, slow talking, Mormon hating, uneducated plebians who don't know any better. Oh, I shouldn't forget, they all have a rifle in the gun rack of their beat up pickup truck.

In some ways Huckabee's best campaigners are those arrogant sounding Beltway political pundits who think they are attacking Huckabee by insulting his supporters. The more they talk, the more they convince the citizens of American that they need a Tribune, that America needs Mike Huckabee.

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