In his post yesterday, John Podhoretz writes:
Of course Mike Huckabee can win the Republican nomination. I dismissed the possibility a few weeks ago by saying he had no “path to the nomination,” and I was foolish to do so. Huckabee’s path is evident—with surprising victories in early states, he steamrolls faltering campaigns and pushes them aside until he is the only guy left standing.
I can, as perhaps John can, see any of five men win the Republican nomination: Giuliani, Romney, McCain, Thompson, and Huckabee. I don’t dismiss any of them, particularly since this race is getting more jumbled and less clear the closer we get to it. Each campaign can put forward a plausible scenario in which they win (though some are obviously more plausible than others). But of course only one candidate will win, and I don’t think it’ll be Huckabee.
I say that as someone who has been impressed with his debating and speaking ability; he possesses, along with Barack Obama, some remarkable political skills. His climb in the polls is testimony to that. At the end of the day, though, I suspect Huckabee is simply too much at odds with the base of the GOP on too many issues, both in the realm of economics and national security. Beyond that, his folksiness and glibness, which can make a good early impression, don’t wear as well over time. His intellectually silly comments—as embodied in his Foreign Affairs essay, in which he likens dealing with Iran to a dispute between parents and friends—are mounting up. So are his more offensive ones, like his claim that his rise in the polls is based on divine intervention (“There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people”).
More fundamentally, though, I suspect what we’ll see is increasing concern about Huckabee’s political character. His head-snapping change on immigration, from lecturing other Republican candidates about how his sympathetic policies toward illegal immigrants while he was Governor embodied the generosity of America, to his embrace of Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the anti-immigrant group the Minuteman Project, was a key insight into Huckabee. To move from the immigration position of the Wall Street Journal to that of National Review in the blink of an eye demonstrates Clintonian flexibility. Speaking of which: Huckabee’s effort to argue that he wasn’t in favor of quarantining AIDS patients in 1992 even as he argued they should be “isolated” (“we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee said fifteen years ago) is reminiscent of the equivocations of another politically ambitious fellow from Hope, Arkansas.
Huckabee is not the only candidate to move away from his past positions, including Romney on abortion and other issues. But I increasingly get the sense that Huckabee is a man who is smooth, shrewd, and a good deal more calculating than he first appears. At the end of the day Huckabee, who surged out of nowhere, will return back to earth. It may not be until after Iowa—but eventually (like, say, in New Hampshire) political gravity will prevail. And in the race for the GOP nomination, Huckabee will not.
