Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is no Jack Kennedy.
And Huckabee is no William Jennings Bryan, the populist turn-of-the-century, three-time Democratic nominee for president.
Jonathan Chait has a nice piece in TNR that demonstrates that Huckabee's quasi-populist appeal that has him near or at the top of Iowa's pre-primary polls is "ideological snake oil," easily removed by analysis and the most superficial glance at Huckabee's record.
Writes Chait:
Seeking more insight into Huckabee's apparently Bryan-esque worldview, I turned to his manifesto, From Hope to Higher Ground. In it, he recounts how, during his governorship, low-wage behemoth Wal-Mart hired away many of his top state employees. This is classic populist grist--a huge corporation buys up government employees to ensure docile oversight. Huckabee expressed his reaction to this outrage thusly: "Frankly, I appreciated it when they saw the same talent and ability in those individuals as I discovered when I originally interviewed and hired them." And he proceeded to call Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton--whose salary surely qualified as immoral if anybody's ever did--a "visionary" with "extraordinary integrity." What kind of populist is this guy?
A very confused one, it seems. When Huckabee first declared his intent to run for the presidency, he was generally dismissed as a naive country bumpkin who had no business in a national campaign. His articulate speeches and rapid ascent in the polls have won him a second look, and he is now lauded in such places as The New Yorker, which called him "curiously unthreatening." Alas, when you look closely at Huckabee's platform, it turns out that everybody pretty much had it right the first time around.
Read more of Jonathan Chait's piece in TNR.
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