Recently in Huckabee Category

The quality of Gov. Mike Huckabee's mercy was not strained. It dropped like a gentle rain from heaven, upon just about any convicted felon who claimed to have found his way to Jesus. This was well known among the incarcerated class in Arkansas and so, it seems, more than the usual number of felons included Jesus in their commutation pleas. That's the well attested old story recapitulated by WaPo religion editor David Waters over on Under God.

Meanwhile, on the schadenfreude front, NYT on-line columnist Timothy Egan lays into Huckabee and his current employer, Roger Ailes, who gleefully hung Michael Dukakis out to dry for once having pardoned a rapist named Willie Horton. On Mr. Ailes' news network, Huck's exoneration by Bill (("you're a stand-up guy") O'Reilly is, indeed, a wonder to behold: Huck innocent, Washington State judges, guilty. Mercy, mercy.

For all this, the Maurice Clemmons case (now brought to a bloody end) points to the fact that Mike Huckabee used to be a much more interesting public figure than he is now. Something like a bona fide compassionate conservative, he was, as governor of Arkansas, notably soft on illegal immigrants, did not scruple to needle the Club for Growth as the "Club for Greed," and, well, acted on the belief that criminals could actually be rehabilitated. For his pains he was, briefly, lionized by the liberal media--and ran into the buzz saw of the Conservative Elite. The kicker to today's NYT story by Kate Zernike pretty much says it all:

On Sunday, before the shooting, Mr. Huckabee sounded ambivalent on Fox News about running for president, saying he liked his role at the network and wanted to be sure that, unlike in 2008, he would receive support from the Republican establishment.

Good luck with that now, Mike.

In a post on who gets the vote of "religious conservatives," Steve Waldman writes:

That leaves Huckabee. As a former Baptist minister himself, he has standing to criticize Palin without being cast as anti-Christian. Mainstream media mistakenly assume that Huckabee failed last time because his base was too limited to religious conservatives. Actually, he fared no better among Christians than McCain and Romney early on. He was distrusted by many in the party for being too liberal, not for being too conservative.

This is entirely misconceived. As any examination of the exit polls from last year's GOP primaries will show you, Huckabee did fail because he had trouble drawing beyond his base of white evangelicals. They loved him. The distrust came from so-called leaders of the religious right, whose suspicion arose, at least in substantial part, because they didn't think he could win. His "liberal" moment was over after Iowa. As for faring no better among Christians than McCain and Romney, that's only if you include all Christians--Catholics and and Mainline Protestants and Mormons as well as Evangelicals. Huckabee couldn't win the former, for sure. But Catholics and Mainline Protestants do not constitute the conservative religious base of the GOP. C'mon, Steve!

The big question for GOP big shots at the moment has to be whether Mitt Romney can manage to garner enough rank-and-file evangelical support to marginalize Huckabee. So look for Romney to play a big role in fighting the Proposition 8 repeal referendum. Where has Romney just bought a new home? La Jolla, California.

Update: I don't appear to be the only one with this thought.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I find it noteworthy that Mike Huckabee only managed 7 percent in the CPAC straw poll, coming in sixth behind Romney, Jindal, Paul, Palin, and Gingrich. Sure, Huck had to split the social conservative vote with Jindal and Palin, but those two didn't even show up for the event. Huck did. He's been humping away for Republican candidates. He's said nothing unorthodox by conservative standards in maybe a year. And in last year's Republican primary, he showed he could carry the evangelical base of the party--effectively killing off Romney's candidacy. So what's the problem? My guess is that the hard-core CPAC types still don't trust him--think he's still soft on immigration, still considers the Club for Growth the Club for Greed, and remains altogether too genial towards the enemy. 

This, from Lauren Collins' interview with Mike Huckabee in the current New Yorker, is worth pondering:

While some of Huckabee’s gripes come off as rinky-dink—in the book, he admonishes Romney for hogging golf-cart parking spaces during the Iowa straw poll—others are more stinging. Asked about Sarah Palin, he responded, “She, uh, was an appropriate choice, because she put John McCain back in the game.” That was the get-along answer, but a few minutes later the new, aggrieved Huckabee resurfaced. He recalled, “It was funny that all through the primary—I mean literally up until McCain got enough delegates to win—people said, ‘You know, Huckabee’s really running for Vice-President. Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ And from that day forward, when I actually was no longer running for President, nobody ever said, ‘Gee, Huckabee would be a great Vice-President.’ ” Neither was he quite so unperturbed by the Palin pick: “I was scratching my head, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.’ It wasn’t so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn’t prepared.”

We've achieved a certain grasp of what got Palin the vice presidential nod: She charmed the pants off those cruising conservative pundits; McCain liked the mavericky cut of her jib; and, yes, the religious righteous elite had her at the top of their lists. But it seems to me that poor ol' Huck is entitled to scratch his head and wonder how he sank so fast from top veepstakes contender to back of the pack.

My guess is that none of the GOP powers-that-be trusted him to be their Highnesses' dog at Kew. ("I am His Highness' dog at Kew/ Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?") He'd called the Club for Growth the Club for Greed, and was never willing to play the government-is-always-the-problem card. He was soft on immigration. He was, or seemed to be, a reluctant culture warrior. He appeared to have no appetite for remaking the world in our image. And his ability of garner votes owed nothing to their support. In a word, he seemed far too independent for a party always in search of the front man, be it Reagan or Quayle or George W. Bush. Under the largely spurious guise of reformer, Palin fit the role perfectly. Sorry, Huck, you didn't.

A scummy extended version of Dole's Godless ad--posted on Huck's blog.

Mike Huckabee is circulating a petition supporting "the sanctity of life" and hopes to have 100,000 signatures by election day.

Remember Mike Huckabee? A year ago he was the cynosure of the MSM, the new face of evangelical politics who wanted to do right by not-so-legal immigrants (or at least their kids) and was happy to tweak the free-market fundamentalist Club for Growth as the "Club for Greed." Now he's got got his own show on Fox and, while nominally supporting John McCain, is ramping up populist rage against the financial bailout in a way that avoids any thought that deregulation policy might have gone a bit too far. As in:

The problem, we’re told, is with the regulators. Actually, that’s not true. The problem is that you failed to regulate the regulators…Getting rid of capital gains taxes, changing the mark to market accounting rules that created some of the artificial devaluation of assets, and insuring bad loans instead of actually buying them are all ways that the situation would be addressed without such a huge risk.

Yep, it's all about congressional greed and laziness. I predict that the Club for Growth (which, incidentally, opposed the bailout but wasn't able to come up with an alternative of its own), won't be making life difficult for Huck in 2012.

Readers of this blog will know that it has taken a rather dyspeptic view of Mike Huckabee's incarnation as Republican Party shill. When Alaska Rep. Don ("Bridge to Nowhere")Young is one of your designated faves, you've got a lot to answer for, in my book. Equally, there's been nothing on Huckabee's blog to indicate any interest in promoting the mildly progressive, anti-Club For Growth point of view that distinguished his presidential candidacy last Fall.

Now comes an interview with Sojourners' Jim Wallis in which Huck talks the progressive talk again, including a straight-up smackdown of the GOP's anti-tax, anti-government wing--which he terms "libertarian." As in:

One of the things I’m frustrated about is that Republicans have been infiltrated by hardcore libertarians. Traditional Republicans don’t hate all forms of government. They just want it to be efficient and effective. They recognize that it has a place and a role.

Growing numbers of people in the Republican Party are just short of anarchists in the sense that they basically say, “Just cut government and cut taxes.” They don’t understand that if you do that, there are certain consequences that do not help problems. It exacerbates them...

One of the most refreshing things beginning to happen is that there’s movement within the evangelical world, that people are accepting social responsibility as a vital part of the gospel presentation. I find that delightful! The old days of “get saved, go to church, go to Heaven, and that’s it” have become eclipsed by “get your hands dirty, this is a world of hurt, you’ve got to help it.” That’s a much healthier assessment of the gospel and how it relates to us.

So far as I can see, however, there's no evidence that Huck is interested in, as the social scientists say, operationalizing these sentiments. If, in choosing candidates to support, he's done anything to separate HuckPac wheat from libertarian tares, I don't see it. And rather than lend his at least tacit support to Rick Warren's August 16 confab with Mssrs. McCain and Obama, he's joining hands with such unreconstructed religious right characters as Family Research Council president Tony Perkins to remind McCain and Obama of the abortion-and-gay-marriage straight and narrow. So much for broadening the evangelical agenda.

Presumably setting his sights on 2012, Huck just seems to want to have it both ways.

Steve Waldman has a bit of a Valentine for Mike Huckabee and his veep prospects, wherein he writes:

Huckabee is a transitional figure in the evangelical world, and possibly a transformational one. As a strong pro-life politician and former Baptist preacher, he is a familiar and not-loathed figure among the evangelical old guard. Beyond that, his emphasis on Christianity as an uplifting rather than judgmental faith taps into the zeitgeist of the New Envagelicals. Younger evangelicals in particular have become convinced that leading a Bible-based, Christ-centered life might involve helping the poor and the environment, in addition to battling abortion. In tone and substance, Huckabee fits these evangelicals better than any Religious Right leader ever has.

Color me dubious. To look at Huck's blog is to see someone who's doing nothing except promoting standard-brand Bush-era GOP conservatives. He's signed on as a commentator on Fox. There's not a hint of the Huckabee that drew the interest of people in search of the next evangelical thing. Maybe he's hiding his light under bushel, against the time when he can let it shine on the way to a new Promised Land. But what he seems mostly up to at the moment is parlaying his notable success in the GOP primaries into gainful employment.

Huckabee on Helms.