Arkansas perspective on Huckabee

Paul Greenberg:

It's happening again. They're back, the out-of-state reporters, the magazine writers, the blow-dried television types who want to know who this guy is, this presidential candidate out of Hope, Ark., of all places.

This year the subject of all this intense interest is one Michael Dale Huckabee, who must be tearing 'em up because he's started to catch it from all those front-runners in the Republican primaries who aren't front-runners any more, largely thanks to him. Which means he's going to be questioned and investigated, poked and prodded, exposed and provoked by a very free press. Which is how the system is supposed to work, however irritating the Front-runner of the Moment may find it.

The Huck is not just a highly effective preacher but populist; he has a knack for reducing complex issues to simple terms, which has made him a fast-rising presidential candidate. How that talent would serve him as president is something else. To mention a couple of his not-so-small problems: His experience in foreign policy is a vacuum, his single speech about it vacuous. And his recent drift toward protectionism is more a tribute to his populist and political instincts than to his knowledge of economics. He has a feel for where the crowd is heading this election year, and seems all too eager to get ahead of it. That may be how to win elections, but is it a good way to govern?

There's a species of Republican true believers right here in Arkansas who've always suspected his bonafides as an honest-to-goodness fiscal conservative and social reactionary. They're largely to be found up in the hills, which tend to be Republican territory in any Southern state because of complicated historical, ethnic, economic and geological reasons having to do with soil, slavery and the plantation system. Back when he was a feisty, hefty pol instead of a walking — no, running — advertisement for weight loss, Brother Huckabee used to fondly refer to such critics as Shi'ite Republicans.

Much the same anti-Huckabee line is now being repeated and amplified by the high-powered Club for Growth, which has launched an all-out effort to dub the Huck just another tax-and-spender. To hear the bean-counters in The Club tell it in their videos, television commercials, YouTube potshots and general frontal assault, Mike Huckabee "spends money like a drunken sailor." (The Club's turns of phrase aren't very original. Its specialty is numbers, not metaphors.)

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To some of us, what the Club for Growth considers Mike Huckabee's great failures sound more like a list of his great successes. When it came to economic policy, he was less interested in griping about problems than solving them.

The Huck doubtless has his failings as a policymaker. For example, he's got a weakness for zany, untested schemes like the national sales tax he's now supporting as a substitute for the income tax. Then there's the draconian approach he's started to flirt with when it comes to illegal immigration. He must know that, however popular such an approach may be among Republican voters in the presidential primaries, it isn't just unenforceable but belies every humane, realistic, Christian thing he's long said about this vexing problem. Presidential politics can be bad for the character.

As for his sad part in the parole of Wayne DuMond, a murderer and rapist who was freed to kill and terrorize again, Mike Huckabee should have donned sackcloth and ashes and had done with it — instead of talking about the role others played in that awful train of events. He should have accepted responsibility for it, as he did, and just stopped there.

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The Club for Growth ad is so devastating because it is mainly tape of Huckabee saying what taxes he is willing to accept rather than fight. I think his protectionism shows a lack of understanding of economics and history that would be dangerous. His tendency to reduce arguments to clever quips plays well on the debate circuit, but does not show depth of knowledge or understanding. Whether it would make him a good candidate to defeat a Democrat is a different question since he would suffer from some of the same weaknesses as they in such a race.