<http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c2629ba4-609c-4575-aa12-27dde47d411e>
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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.
At the broadest ideological level, Huckabee is a conservative, happily paying tribute to the genius of the marketplace, the need for self-reliance, and other conservative standbys.
And, yet, his attachment to laissez-faire dogma is so tissue-thin that it can be blown to bits by the slightest brush with actual experience. Often this leads him in humane and intelligent directions, such as when he expanded children's health insurance. But it can also lead him to embrace simplistic statism, such as his crude protectionism and wholesale embrace of agriculture subsidies. ("Imagine the further weakening of America if we were also dependent on foreign sources for our food needs," he warns darkly, as if Al Qaeda will starve us into submission with a naval blockade.)
The reason Huckabee can so easily break from conservative ideology is that he sees everything in personal terms. He chastises conservatives: "For a kid with asthma, who is sitting on the steps of a hospital--let them have an economic policy that doesn't care about that kid." Even though his book is purportedly a public-policy blueprint, it is written in the style of a self-help book. Political manifestos are typically built around a series of policy positions. Huckabee's is built around personal advice. Every chapter ends with recommendations for what the reader can do to make America a better place, most of which have nothing to do with politics. ("Keep receipts for tax-deductible items"; "Attend ethnic festivals"; "Make a to-do list every day.") As grist for a Sunday sermon, this is perfectly nice. As the basis for a presidential campaign, it's appalling.
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If nothing else, this episode [specifically the bogus Fair Tax, see link - ST] illustrates why Republicans with moderate impulses, like Huckabee, are so politically marginal: Doctrinaire free-marketers firmly control all the think tanks and magazines that feed the GOP. So Republicans who aren't comfortable with the party's plutocratic tilt--Huckabee is one, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is another--have no intellectual infrastructure to fall back on. They wind up coming up with plans that are either vacuous or wildly counterproductive.
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