The secret to Mike Huckabee's success
With his meteoric rise in Iowa, the aw-shucks former governor has an unlikely strategic doppelgänger -- John Edwards.
By Walter Shapiro
Dec. 21, 2007 | Mike Huckabee's transformation from poll asterisk to political astronaut has been so sudden and dramatic that there is a desperate effort to understand WHAT IT ALL MEANS. Huckabee's return Wednesday afternoon to Iowa, where he is leading in most polls, was accompanied by the kind of camera-crush media frenzy unknown in a Republican presidential race since the glory days of John McCain in 2000. Speaking Wednesday night to 200 Republicans in Ames, Huckabee engagingly confessed, "I get asked every day, 'Why do you think you're surging in the polls?' The honest answer is that I don't know that I know."
(snip)
The unified field theory of Huckabee also stresses the candidate's moderate record and rhetoric about education, poverty and, until recently, immigration. Viewed from some angles, Huckabee is either a closet Democrat who opposes abortion (the Mitt Romney interpretation) or the true "compassionate conservative," rather than the ersatz George W. Bush version. But these explanations miss something potentially important. The miracle birth of the Republican candidate with the four-word name -- Mike Huckabee Iowa Front-runner -- has as much to do with social class as religion. There is nothing subtle about Huckabee's celebration of his humble roots: He gleefully told 150 supporters (some more accurately described as acolytes) in Marshalltown Thursday morning that a "Republican muckety-muck" had recently declared that Huckabee was unelectable because he had a "hick last name."
(snip)
A quick mental scan of recent presidential campaign history reveals few GOP parallels to Huckabee. Pat Robertson, who finished a shocking second in the 1988 Iowa caucuses, and Pat Buchanan, who actually won the 1996 New Hampshire primary, were angry protest candidates. Huckabee's make-it-up-as-he-goes-along style is reminiscent of Howard Dean's improvisations during the 2004 race. But the Democrat whom Huckabee appears to be channeling is John Edwards, who never missed an opportunity to remind voters back in 2004 that he was "the son of a mill worker." At a chaotic rally in a cramped room in a West Des Moines shopping mall Wednesday night, Huckabee lifted a signature Edwards phrase, promising that when he triumphs in Iowa on Jan. 3, "America can say thank you for restoring faith in a political system that's not just run by corporate greed but is run by ordinary citizens." Huckabee followed up in Marshalltown by uttering a line of such naked populism that the Baccarat crystal probably rattled in corporate dining rooms around the country: "Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who doesn't find himself wholly owned and completely tied to the biggest corporations in the country?"
Edwards' stump speech, which is far more policy-specific than Huckabee's humorous ramblings, features a riff about how as a trial lawyer in North Carolina he stared down the special interests and their elite armies of corporate lawyers. The same little-guy-triumphant theme is embedded in Huckabee's appeal to voters. In Ames, before a crowd of 200 likely caucus-goers, Huckabee said, "I didn't go to any Ivy League school. I paid my way through a small Christian college in Arkansas. I know that when I first ran for office, I ran against several guys who had Harvard law degrees ... But I found out that the things that I learned in life helped me just as much as Harvard. And, by the way, I won those elections against those guys with the Harvard law degrees."
(snip)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/12/21/huckabee/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
