I've been turning this over in my head for a while, as remarks on Mike Huckabee's charm and likability have become de rigueur: Am I the only one who finds Huckabee viscerally unappealing? There's nothing endearing to me about a cross between a diet guru and a televangelist selling condominiums in Heaven, which is how Huckabee strikes me. The guy's so full of crap I can smell it wafting out his ears. He's running on a quirky-at-best tax plan that has no chance of passing, and gets a free pass from some of the same people who harp endlessly on the alleged phoniness of Mitt Romney (whose left pinky is better qualified for the presidency than Huckabee). I don't get it.
--John Tabin of The American Spectator, requoted by David Weigel at Reason
Romney is at best my third choice among the GOP field (behind the guy who was a U.S. attorney and the guy who played a DA on TV, maybe also behind the guy who spent years in Hanoi whose utter wrongness about campaign finance reform might be moot now) but as the pairwise comparison goes I'll heartily agree.
Huckabee threatens to bring together an interesting post-Reagan coalition of evangelicals, blue collars, and bleeding hearts. The biggest loser there is the free market. (Ironically, some of Huckabee's biggest flaws track closely to issues where Bill Clinton was most underrated.)
How is he stopped (and when)? That probably requires a lot of effort and cooperation between economic conservatives and social liberals, two groups that do notoriously badly in the polls.
(Has it really been 11 years since the Weld-Kerry senate race? Bill Weld was a flawed politician who wouldn't have stood a chance on the national stage but he easily won those debates, something that perhaps says as much about Kerry as about him.)
Posted by Matt Bruce at December 5, 2007 11:34 AM