WHEN WE PAID pundits try to provide campaign analysis, we often strain to find historical analogies. Although I’m not asking for sympathy, please understand that it’s not easy. There have been only fifty-something presidential campaigns, and obviously those conducted in the horse-and-buggy era provide scant parallels to an election held in our own age of Al Gore’s wondrous intertubes. Besides, every one of these things is unique.
That said, I think I’ve found a near perfect parallel to the Huckabee ’08 campaign–Pat Buchanan in 1996. Buchanan stunned the world in 1996 when he defeated Bob Dole in New Hampshire. That result caused the Republican electorate to ask itself two questions:
1) Is Pat Buchanan really up to being president?
2) If Bob Dole comes back and wins the presidency, do you think he might turn New Hampshire into a nuclear weapon testing zone?
A lot of Republicans wanted to believe that Buchanan might be the real deal. They/we thought the uninspired and uninspiring Dole would be obvious cannon fodder for the Clinton juggernaut. At least Buchanan could turn a phrase and had some charisma. But there were some constituencies that had natural concerns about a potential Buchanan presidency, namely gays, Jews, and people with triple-digit IQs.
Buchanan could have tried to assuage those concerns when the spotlight shone on him after his New Hampshire win. Instead, he amped up the crazy. He went to Arizona, donned a cowboy hat, and began firing a rifle with a devilish grin. His rhetoric became even more heated. Republicans who wouldn’t have minded a viable alternative to Bob Dole, i.e. all of us, realized that Pat Buchanan wasn’t the guy. Dole went on to secure the nomination and ultimate destruction at the hands of Bill Clinton. At least New Hampshire was spared the potential wrath of a vengeful Dole administration.
Mike Huckabee is this cycle’s Pat Buchanan. A lot of Republicans wanted to believe that he was the answer to the flawed deck of frontrunners that the political gods have dealt us. I can’t honestly say I was ever rooting for Huckabee, but a month ago I expected him to win the nomination. All he had to do was come across as a credible commander-in-chief for the five weeks leading up to Iowa and he would have pulled it off.
But Huckabee went the Buchanan route. Rather than assure the Republican electorate that he was more than a one trick pony who could speak beautifully on social issues and spiritual concerns, he doubled down on his pastor side. Perhaps with good cause. When he ventured opinions about serious policy matters outside his comfort zone, especially regarding global affairs, he showed an ignorance that was quite frankly stunning for someone who had the audacity to seek the presidency at a time of war.
And there’s also Huckabee’s past. Every politician has a past–issues he flip-flopped on or positions he took that his party dislikes. But Huckabee’s past has caused Republicans to remember the Arkansas mores that drove us nuts during the Clinton years. Seemingly every day, another piece of, er, stuff, hits the fan. Over the weekend, it came out that Huckabee received $35,000 in honoraria in 2006 from a company that does stem cell research, the very same company that social conservatives blasted Mitt Romney over because his blind trust had invested in it. Huckabee’s take of $35,000 from the stem cell researchers was but a small sliver of the roughly $378,000 in outside fees that Huckabee raked in during his final year as Arkansas’ governor. Too bad he didn’t have Hillary Clinton’s facility with commodities trading–such a skill probably would have made things easier for Huckabee.
I COME NOT TO bury Mike Huckabee. Mike Huckabee has buried himself. Over the next week, the Republican party in Iowa and elsewhere will decide that Huckabee may be a swell fellow, but he’s not of presidential timbre. I predict this decision will be made en masse. Huckabee’s support will likely crater in Iowa.
But here’s the fun part–no one will see it coming. Because of the holidays, there will be scant polling between now and the caucuses, and what polling there is will be of dubious reliability. (Paging ARG!) If Huckabee is going to lose a point or so a day between the end of last week and January 3, we won’t know it until the results from the caucuses are in. If Huckabee declines to a distant second or perhaps even third place as I am now fearlessly predicting he will, it will catch the voting public by surprise. When they tuned this race out before the long Christmas weekend, the media told them Huckabee was a sure thing in Iowa.
Huckabee’s support will have to go somewhere. The logical recipients are Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. While Iowans may not love Romney, they do respect him. Unlike Huckabee, he has impressed them as being of presidential timbre. And Thompson, at last, is running well in Iowa. He’s surging.
A stunning second place finish will get Thompson a moment in the spotlight. If he uses it well, he could emerge as the anti-Romney and make things interesting with a win in South Carolina. That goal will be more viable if McCain manages to tarnish the luster of Romney’s Iowa victory in New Hampshire. There may yet be life in the Thompson campaign.
But the immediate aftermath of Iowa will belong to Romney. It will be his moment to either seize the nomination or blow it. The best moment of the campaign for Romney so far came when he gave his long-awaited religion speech. The substance was interesting, but far more impressive was Romney’s delivery. For once he wasn’t selling, but rather speaking seriously about serious issues.
When Mitt Romney hits the national stage (likely shared with Barack Obama) on the night of January 3, much of the country will have heard only the following narrative regarding him: Flip-flopper, phony, insincere, plastic. That’s why he has to make sure to give a serious speech that night, one that eschews applause lines for substance.
On Friday night, I posted an excerpt from Ronald Reagan’s legendary “A Time for Choosing” speech. For those of us who remember Reagan only as a happy old man, the sobriety and gravity of that speech are bracing. That speech made Ronald Reagan. He had been a second rate movie star. After that speech, he became the GOP’s philosophical lodestar.
Mitt Romney can overhaul the public’s perception of him. January 3 may likely be his big chance.
Dean Barnett is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
