National Review editor Rich Lowry has an important point about Mike Huckabee: what makes him interesting is not the possibility of his winning the nomination (those odds are virtually nil), but the nothing-to-lose, say-anything “joie de vivre” of his campaign. And as Lowry’s column reminds us, part of that freedom of movement has to do with the fact that Huckabee is emphatically not part of the paid-up GOP establishment.

Huckabee speaks so fluidly and so charmingly that the media tend to overlook the sheer ridiculousness of so much of what he’s actually saying. The funny thing is that this critique comes from the right as well as from the left. We notice his loopy ideas about flat taxes, “holocausts,” and the Founders, while conservatives like Lowry fixate on the populistishness of Huckabee’s economic message:

Huckabee shines in the verbal contests of the debates, and his wise-cracking, guitar-playing persona ingratiates him to journalists. But for all his eloquence, what Huckabee lacks, fundamentally, is a message. Unlike past long-shot crusaders like Buchanan and McCain, there is no new direction in which he wants to take the party. He has different mood music than his rivals — acknowledging middle-class anxieties and sounding nationalistic notes — but these are more rhetorical riffs than part of an integrated worldview.

Actually, I think Huckabee does represent an alternative path for the GOP, albeit not one that the party’s intellectuals and financiers want to see it take: renewed social conservatism crossed with a populist contempt for the Gospel of Milton Friedman. That said, Lowry’s probably not wrong that Huckabee himself hasn’t exactly worked out the manifesto for this project: he’s just emblematic of some of what it could mean, in a somewhat accidental way.

At any rate, Lowry thinks the Huckster would be an ideal VP match for Giuliani, which may be true strategically (anything to give the fundamentalists the sense they’ll still have a man in the administration), but would be weirdly dissonant on a personality level. And is this just the standard conservative understanding of the vice-presidency: that’s where you stick the crazies?

Posted by Paul Curtis
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 7:54 am

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