Outsourced: On Obama, Huckabee, etc.

The Wichita bureau does my thinking for me this morning:

Obama remains too green. Dowd makes the point that he really didn’t see the Clinton high-low block coming. He’s too thin skinned. If we need an official visionary, he’s our guy. If we need a tough decision maker with the right connections, it’s Hillary. She brings her own biases and pent up grudges but she ain’t thin skinned. Brittle perhaps.

And if Bill doesn’t really love her, he sure can fake the anger. Pick on my wife, you $%&!. Where’s my horsewhip. Or better still, cane him on the street. (Old Washington custom, caning.)

Yes, that gets it nicely. A defining moment for me was when he snubbed Hillary at the State of the Union. What do you think this is buddy, a junior prom? You'll need to deal with that woman when she is majority leader in the Senate.

Wichita also weighs in on my current fascination, the Huckster:

I think that McCain would make a serious if not fatal error in picking Huckabee as VP. I might be able to vote for McCain if the spare were acceptable; Huckabee is not. He represents a minority in the Republican party and the machine in Washington would eat him. Or simply let him loose on some of his silly issues (evolution, the poor) and make the decisions some where else. He alone of the field does not seem to have the connections to put together a team of experts to run the government.

Well put again. I guess what continues to fascinate me about Huckabee is that genuine likeability, coupled with gobsmacking ignorance. He charms the birds off a tree and the next time you look, he's talking about adding lanes to I-95. Ironic that it leaves me rooting for the one Republican for whom I have the most personal contempt--the one whose hair doesn't move in a high wind, but who has sufficient lack of prnciple that he might actually run a half-way decent government.

What Makes Me Nervous Is...

I really like Mike Huckabee. Stuff like this does nothing to dampen my

(my what? Enthusiasm? No. Affection? Oh, be nice. Admiration? Too austere. But he is quite a guy, don't you think?)

Ivan Goes to the Piggly Wiggly, And Finds Consolation

Ivan's in his truck again:

i was driving to ardmore yesterday, WLRH was off the air, my second choice is A&M station but it had rapcrap, i finally ended up with rush limburger. he was screaming hysterically against huckabee. went to the bank, came out, he was still screaming against huckabee. went to piggly wiggly, came out, he was still screaming against huckabee. went to lottery ticket store, came out, he was still screaming against huckabee. maybe huckabee's win last night has its auxiliary benefits.

Political Footnotes while Queuing

I'm queued up waiting to get online with Comcast to report an outage (I'm 165! Ooh, I'm 168! Ah, I'm 157!). Anyway, I might as well take the time to data-mine the Iowa statistic (culled from Saturday's paper NYT):

• The youth-and-women candidates: Obama and Huckabee. Both swamped the competition among young voters. Huckabee also had a strong lead among women. NYT says Obama ran "almost as well" among women as Hillary--but I could swear I heard somebody on the radio just now saying he actually led her among women.
  

• John Edwards' best income bracket: voters with incomes over $100,000--so much for working-class populism. But Edwards is also the runaway favorite among caucusers who identify themselves as "conservative" (and BTW, how long has it been that voters with incomes over $100,000 have been numerous enough to count in the Iowa caucus?).

• If New Hampshire is shaping up as McCain v. Obama, here's a curiosity: among Democrats, Obama got 50 percent of the under-45 vote (and only 24 percent of those over 45). Meanwhile among Republicans, McCain got 58 percent of voters over 60. So, old v. young?
  

• Kleiman speculated the other day (link) that independents in New Hampshire will abandon McCain for Obama. But actually iin the Iowa Republican caucus, McCain did not rank first among independents: that ribbon goes to Ron Paul.

• Ha!"Among those who said that shared values or personal convictions were the most important consideration, almost no one voted for Mr. Giuliani."
  

I'm up to 121 in the queue. This is going to be a long morning.

The Huckabee Panic: A Footnote

Carpetbagger has a typically thorough and astute "literature review" up, summarizing the right's conniption fit over Mike Huckabee (link), but let me add a footnote: I think it shows just how phony this whole "conservative coalition" really is. The GOP establishment is perfectly willing to give away the store on throwaway issues (!) like abortion and school prayer. But when a genuine, true-blue, take-no-prisoners evangelical joins the race, their small intestines turn to water. I don't feel any special sympathy for the evangelical leadership who have played the logrolling game as cynically as anybody. But if I were a mainline working-stuff born-again, I'd be feeling used & abused right now, wondering who my real friends are.

Perhaps Tedious Explanatory Footnote: The establishment has been willing to give away the story on abortion and school prayer because they know neither will ever affect them personally--the pro-life movement is about denying abortions to poor women, not to the daughters of the elite, and you can perfectly well opt out of school prayer by sending your kid to the right kind of private school. Gay marriage is, I admit, a tougher nut to crack: the establishment knows that the establishment couldn't get off its dime without the tweendecks infrastructure of conservative gays. My guess is that they've been gambling on the proposition that the issue will pass; that we are pretty close to realizing that they're here, they're queer, and we might as well deal with it. I remember what my old girlfriend used to say about the Virgin Mary: oy, happens in the best Jewish families.

Huckabee Watch

Michael (sic) Froomkin thinks this makes Mike (sic) Huckabee look like an idiot. I don't agree at all. I think this is precisely the kind of thing that can carry Huckabee to--well, whereever. I still can't imagine that we will really elect that guy, but I've saying since the get-go that he has an amazing ability to connect as down-home just folks.

Oh, and congratulations, Canada.

True What They Say About...?

Okay, yesterday we had Mike Huckabee asking whether Mormons believe that Jesus and Satan are brothers (answer: sort of yes, but it's not like you make it sound). Today we have Laura Vozzella of the Baltimore Sun recalling her close encounter with Mitt Romney's underwear (Pendleton 34 boxers) (link).

Now is as good a time as any to recall my friend Joe, who claims he got thrown out of Jesuit High School for asking the sex education instaructor whether Mormon women make love with their socks on. I don't think he ever did get his answer.

Brownback: Not a Lunatic

I used to think Sam Brownback was a lunatic. Now, I see he is just a whore (link). I liked him better as a lunatic.

Afterthought: And here goes another one.

Why Huckabee (With a Rant on Looters)

Carpetbagger tries to rally the troops against the Huckabee surge (link) and who can blame him—Huckabee could well be a disaster as a president, and not entirely because of his Bible-thumping Christianity. But I think Carpetbagger still misses the point in his conclusion:

I’m not quite sure [says Carpetbagger—ed.] why the media has all of a sudden decided to swoon; it probably has something to do with the fact that the most competitive Republican candidates are pretty awful. But let’s not forget that Huckabee isn’t quite the moderate every-man his fans are making him out to be.

Well, I’m pretty sure I know why, and it has nothing to do with “moderation.” The reason is, rather, that that Huckabee is –I was about to say “likeable.” But not quite. Okay, it is true that “likeability” is at the core of the Huckabee persona, but it’s not the real point here. The real point is his capacity to make a powerful emotional connection.

Democrats persistently underrate the importance of emotional connection in a political leader—ironic, when you recall that they had their greatest success with Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose connective power knows no peer. It’s a mistake that leads them candidates with so little connective power—John Kerry, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore (at least the pre-green Al Gore; the new model may be different). It leads to the (mistaken) belief that the secret of Bill Clinton’s success was his powerful academic record—whereas in truth, the real secret was his capacity to make them forget his academic record, and to meet them as one of their own.

This “connection” stuff can get complicated. In drafting this note, I made four points in order: that Huckabee is likeable; that he is comfortable in his own skin; that he’s not particularly mad at anybody; and that he can connect. I think all of these points are correct. But the way I wrote it, I made it sound as if the fourth point (connection) followed as a consequence of the other three. And this is patently absurd. Hitler, after all, was the greatest connector of the 20^th Century, and he was about as likeable as an unspayed adolescent alligator. I’d take Huckabee over Hitler, but this connectivity bit seems oddly fickle in its affections.

A year ago, when Huckabee was nowhere, it amused me to predict that he would be the candidate. Now that he seems to be getting some traction, I’m beginning to have my doubts. But the point has little or nothing to do with likeability. The point would be that Huckabee will not pass muster with the real power in the Republican party—the looters who regard the government as a giant honey pot for their own enrichment. The looters can never carry an election on their own so they have to make deals with other constituencies with more pervasive passions as, for example, the Christian right. But if these “other constituencies” ever start getting the illusion they really control anything, they are in for a cruel awakening.

Colliseum Smackdown: Christian v. Christian

There's bound to be a certain plague-on-both-your-houses attitude on the part of skeptics when they consider the pending smackdown between Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee (link). But as one who wouldn't on a bet vote for either one of them, I have to admit: I find Brownback to be a space cadet, and Huckabee (by dramatic contrast) totally engaging. Indeed I've always found Huckabee, on a personal level (as filtered through my TV screen) to be the most likeable person in the race, perhaps in either party. You're listening to a guy who (unlike, I gather, almost everyone in the galaxy) never found Ronald Reagan likeable. Brownback doesn't strike me as personally revolting (like Tom Delay and many others), nor as the kind of guy that makes you want to run and take a shower (like Mitt Romney and many, many, many others). Just weird. By contrast, I wonder what it is about Huckabee. Or me.