04 January 2008

Campaign '08: Think About This

If Mike Huckabee continues to succeed, it's because he's the Barack Obama of the Christian Right. Discuss.


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It may not seem that way right now, given the hysterical way in which some people, most of them Republicans, are reacting to his ascendancy, but it's probably no accident that Huckabee and Obama are rising at the same time. It's easy enough to say that both have succeeded in packaging themselves as outsiders and embodiments of change. But in Obama's case, people acknowledge that an important factor in his success is that he's a black man who doesn't seem "black." He doesn't fit stereotypes and isn't burdened with the predictable "black" political agenda. Consider Huckabee by analogy. People are trying to scare us about him, and other people are doing a good job of scaring themselves. There may indeed be good reason to worry. Consult the resurgent Fundagelical Watch blog for a selection of reasons. But consider Huckabee directly. Watch him talk or read his Foreign Affairs article. Note his gaffes if you must. But on the evidence especially of his Meet the Press interview, Huckabee has done much to position himself as the Christian Right candidate who doesn't seem "Christian Right." He simply doesn't seem as threatening as his precursors have, unless you make assumptions based on his identity or judge him by those who endorse him. If anything, Huckabee has suffered more from "prejudice" than Mitt Romney has. In this, his experience may seem different from Obama, but at last some voters have spoken, and the results are famously similar.

Bear in mind that I can't imagine ever voting for Huckabee. He supports the war and the surge, opposes women's sovereignty over their own bodies, and regards certain consensual sexual relations among adults as sin. For all that the "conservative" establishment has condemned him as some sort of apostate, he probably comes too close to Ronald Reagan on economic issues for comfort, for all his occasional populist rhetoric about corporate greed. If the general election comes down to Huckabee vs. Obama with no decent third-party candidate, I'd have to go with Obama. Having said all this, I say again that Huckabee is still something different, at least in manner if not in matter, from what we've seen before in his patch of the political spectrum. If Iowa means anything, it has told us that some people, at least, are looking for choices rather than confrontations. Obama vs. Huckabee would definitely be the most interesting general election possible, especially if Ron Paul ran independently and could join them in debates, and they could all be joined by a genuine candidate of the left. Even if we're left with the first two, I suspect that they might comport themselves differently from Democrats and Republicans past -- but I also suspect that I may be taking my speculations a little too far now. On to New Hampshire.

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