The Huckabee insurgency

Jonathon Martin:

To spend a day with Mike Huckabee on the campaign trail is to hear echoes of his three insurgent predecessors.

He has the fervent evangelical following in this state that Pat Robertson had in 1988, he deploys populist rhetoric like Pat Buchanan and, just like John McCain eight years ago, he is not afraid to diverge from party orthodoxy in speaking to Republican audiences.

Huckabee is the latest in a 20-year line of rebel GOP presidential competitors.

What sets him apart, however, is a campaign seemingly based entirely on the fact that he is an insurgent.

A vote for him, Huckabee says, would reinforce Iowans’ self-interest in their role as the first voters in the presidential contest.

“If we’re able to pull this off, do you think there will ever be a future candidate that will come and just throw some money at you and say, ‘Hey, you ought to vote for me’?” Huckabee asks an enthusiastic crowd packed into a high school auditorium in Sioux City.

“People will be coming to this state [in future caucuses] and they’ll work it, they’ll prove the value of the Iowa caucus like nothing else ever has. So it’s good for me; it’s good for you.”

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And his policy proposals are a motley mélange of positions that please his faithful: the FairTax for his FairTax enthusiasts; home-schooling, traditional marriage and right-to-life for his evangelical base; a hard-line immigration proposal for just about everybody in the conservative tent; and riffs on the importance of arts education and “weapons of mass instruction” to keep up the different-kind-of-conservative shtick that tickles the media.

On foreign policy and national security, Huckabee offers a generic plea to end the country’s addiction to foreign oil. And he recently has embraced the Colin Powell doctrine of overwhelming force.

He uses this second point as a fig leaf to explain to partisan Republican audiences the controversy over his recent Foreign Affairs essay.

“I’m getting some criticism because I’ve even suggested that there were mistakes [in Iraq], primarily the light footprint concept,” Huckabee offers at a morning rally in Council Bluffs.

But it was not the size-of-force criticism — a common and inoffensive critique even among Republicans — he offered well into the Foreign Affairs piece that drew a rebuke from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Rather, it was the start of his second paragraph that generated the buzz: “American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up and reach out. The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.”

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There is more. It was not just the size of the footprint that caused the problems in Iraq, but the tactics used. The smaller force had no difficulty with overthrowing the regime. Having twice as many men would not have made any significant difference in that phase of the war. And, after the surge the most important difference was the counterinsurgency strategy that put the troops with the people and protected them. This led to better intelligence and cooperation which helped to break the back of the enemy. Huckabee's maxims do not suggest any appreciation for these factors. His foreign policy writings look naive.

His embrace of the fair tax probably cuts into the Ron Paul libertarian base some. It is an interesting concept, but there are far too many people with a self interest in the current system including all Democrats who look at the tax code as something other than a source of revenue, instead seeing it as a vessel for awarding some voters and punishing others, particularly the successful. Even if elected his chances of implementing the fair tax are remote.