How has Mike Huckabee, a man apparently unversed on even the most
rudimentary policy subjects, zipped to the front of the Republican pack? I blame this sorry state of events, as I do most sorry states of events, on Bill Clinton. When Clinton thudded onto the national scene in 1991, he spoke like a good old country boy; even his supporters sometimes disparaged him as a hayseed. Of course, this stereotype hardly fit a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law grad who had managed to hoodwink a ROTC colonel before he had hair on his chest. Bill Clinton may have talked like a denizen of Dogpatch, but he turned out to be sophisticated and sharp. From this juncture, his 1992 campaign stunt of trotting out his grating, post-feminist spouse as a high IQ trophy wife seems hardly necessary. It’s hard to believe that once upon a time, Clinton needed a spousal co-president with intellectual firepower to spare to reassure the public regarding his own brainpower. His successors in “Aw shucks, I’m just a country boy” politicking have continued the narrative that making a show of talking in a slow drawl doesn’t mean diminished intellectual firepower. John Edwards has played his hillbilly bona fides with more brashness than even Bill Clinton would have dreamt of, even though Edwards knew nothing like the poverty and deprivation that Clinton did. Nevertheless, Edwards’s hillbilly shtick has always and obviously been nothing more than shtick. He was smart enough to make millions; even though Bob Shrum ultimately dismissed Edwards as a “Bill Clinton who hadn’t read the books,” Edwards can sound impressively wonkish on a wide variety of subjects. On the Republican side, Fred Thompson has given the down home stuff a try. One of the reassuring things about the Thompson campaign is that underneath his “simple country K Street lobbyist” act, there beats the heart of a serious policy wonk. In other words, his political manner is an artifice. And that’s a good thing. Even the most idealistic voter doesn’t believe that the world’s most complex job should be entrusted to a fellow with a good heart but a mediocre brain. The downside of these cornpone peddling campaigns is that they’ve lulled the American public into a false sense of complacency regarding its politicians’s qualifications. Clinton, Thompson and Edwards all went to great lengths to appear normal, but they were (and are) far from normal. The American public has come to assume that all politicians that reach the “elite eight” stage of the Oval Office sweepstakes are qualified for the job, regardless of how many hillbilly homilies they habitually spin. As a flood of half-baked Huckabee policy pronouncements and ludicrous social decrees have washed onto the campaign trail, Republicans are beginning to confront a disquieting reality. Perhaps with Huckabee, the simpleton act isn’t just an act.
