Huckabee Watch

Our friend Max Brantley honed in on exactly what’s on our minds these days, and summarized why this blog exists:

Arkansas is a microcosm of the national electorate. Win Arkansas – with its blend of blue dog Democrats in the east and south, yellow dog Republicans in the Northwest, yellow dog Democrats in some locations and many swing independents – and you are likely to win it all. That’s been true for about four decades.

Huckabee has demonstrated appeal here. He’s the prototype of a candidate able to replicate a winning Southern strategy — government-friendly, gun-toting, gay bashing, abortion hating. Democrats best be careful what they wish for. And Republicans need not fear Huckabee. He’ll be very happy to keep the Wall Street greedheads happy.

The talking heads should just yield to Brantley whenever it comes to Huckabee discussions. The Arkansas Times’ coverage of our former governor is unmatchable. Every scandal that’s broken since Huckabee announced was originally brought to light by the Arkansas Times.

Like Lennie Small, David Huckabee (pictured above in Janet’s lap) didn’t mean to hurt the stray dog, he just loved it too hard.

During this week’s republican debate in Iowa, Mitt Romney introduced an intriguing model:

We’re not going to get the White House nor strengthen America unless we can pull together the coalition of conservatives and conservative thought that has made us successful as a party. And that’s social conservatives. It’s also economic conservatives. And foreign policy and defense conservatives.

Those three together form the three legs of the Republican stool that allowed Ronald Reagan to get elected and allowed our party to have strength over the last several decades.

Adopting Romney’s construction, we have three distinct stakeholders participating in the Republican nomination: Social conservatives, Economic conservatives, and Defense conservatives.

Clearly, Huckabee is enjoying strong support from the social conservative “leg” of Romney’s stool. He has either achieved — or is on his way to achieving — a plurality in every poll taken about the GOP nomination; meanwhile, his four other “viable” (McCain, Thompson, Romney, Giuliani) opponents have lost grip on the social conservative leg and are jockeying for the other two legs.

Romney’s model might suggest a balance of ideological influence by the three distinct stakeholders under the “Conservative” umbrella, but Huckabee reminds us that when it comes to electoral influence, social conservatives make Romney’s stool uncomfortably wobbly for the Defense/Economic conservatives.

The Defense/Economic conservatives have always had more influence and bigger megaphones. They have well-funded, palatial think tanks (with a quota of cubicles for their kooky cousins, the social conservatives), book publishing companies, newspapers, and magazines. They have Rupert Murdock on speed dial.

None of that is important to Huckabee, though. He’s got the numbers.

We’re seeing this paradox playing out right now: as the press on Huckabee gets louder and nastier (mostly from the Right), Huckabee’s poll numbers go higher and higher. This phenomenon (worse press = better numbers) will become even more incongruous over the next two weeks, and it will pave Huckabee’s way to becoming the republican nominee.

Aaron Sadler (Stephens Media Group) has a contradictory roundup of some columnists’ prognoses of Huckabee:

“It will still be extremely difficult for him to win in New Hampshire,” said the Union Leader’s Drew Cline. “I don’t think Huckabee is going to do all that well in New Hampshire. I just don’t see him catching fire.”

and

“He won’t have the money and it will be difficult for him to respond,” said David Yepsen, a longtime columnist for the Des Moines (Iowa) Register. The timing would negate one benefit to Huckabee’s sudden surge - that criticism comes during the holidays. No one will attack Huckabee around Christmas, or risk voter backlash, Yepsen said. “What are you going to do? Roll out an attack ad on Christmas Eve with ‘Silent Night’ playing the background?” Yepsen said.

and

Jeanne Cummings, a columnist for the political newspaper, The Politico, said she expects GOP opponents to exploit Huckabee’s newfound momentum with anti-Huckabee direct mailings in Iowa just days before that state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. “He’ll never see it coming,” Cummings said, adding that the attacks by mail will probably be delivered to Republican voters right after Christmas...”The thing about Huckabee is he ran and won as governor as a conservative, small state. Right now, he’s running for governor of Iowa.”

First of all, isn’t it annoying when members of the mainstream media tell us what other members of the mainstream media are saying?

Setting aside mushy speculation (”I just don’t see him catching fire”) the only substantive criticism in this entire roundup that Huckabee is cash-strapped, and that he’ll hit a wall in New Hampshire after he wins Iowa. Fair enough. He might not have a sophisticated ground game in place, but thus far Huckabee has probably run the most cost-efficient national campaign in modern American history. Outspent 23:1 by Romney, he is poised to win Iowa. The ground game will be much less relevant in New Hampshire than Drew Cline suspects. However quick they are to boast their “independence,” New Hampshire voters live in Iowa’s shadow. With Rudy slipping in New Hampshire, and the collective “WTF” coming out from the national media in response to Huckabee’s win in Iowa, Huckabee won’t need a robust ground game — John Kerry didn’t.

Jeanne Cummings’ claims are simply bizarre. “[Huckabee will] never see it [pre-Iowa Caucus attack mailers] coming” … “[h]e’s running for governor of Iowa”?

He’s in the lead. I think a front-running candidate who has demonstrated he is capable of being 2300% more cost-efficient than another candidate, just might be able to anticipate some jabs from opponents. And, Jeanne, how is this anything like “running for governor of Iowa” when the republican Iowa Caucus attracts a mere 100,000 participants Oh, and his visit to Iowa this week has been the first time in almost a month.

Unbelievably, many in the mainstream media aren’t ready to accept Huckabee as a top tier candidate, and they will continue to put forth these half-baked analyses. The effect will be a lowering of Huckabee’s expectations, which will enable the fire in New Hampshire they “just don’t see [Huckabee] catching”.

Throughout my short adult life, almost every commentary I’ve heard on Huckabee came through the mouthpiece of a democrat in Arkansas. I remember attending my first Democratic Party events in high school and early college, where Huckabee was a common punching bag. Nobody took him seriously. It became my duty as a Democrat, and I learned to embrace the mockery and even began ridiculing Huckabee on my own.

The 2002 election cycle was preceded by speculation (and hope) that then-Attorney General Mike Beebe would run against Governor Huckabee. He would eventually be criticized for not taking him on that year, and instead leaving the job for then-State Treasurer Jimmie Lou Fisher. I, too, was frustrated that Beebe didn’t run, because I’d been indoctrinated to think of Huckabee as a joke. Jimmie Lou gave Huckabee a run for his money, but she ending up losing. This loss was tough, not only because I love Jimmie Lou, but because it challenged my world-view that Huckabee was a joke.

After Huckabee’s reelection in 2002, chatter began to surface that he was considering a run for president. The mere idea of this was viewed as preposterous to democrats in Arkansas — it was used by our party chairman as a joke at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner to get a rise out of the crowd. Once again, I laughed at the Huckabee jokes.

When Huckabee finally announced he was forming an exploratory committee, the national press felt about the same as the folks in Arkansas: they didn’t think much of it. This would continue into the early summer with speculation of Fred Thompson’s entry. By the mid-summer of 2007, when I brought up Huckabee’s candidacy as something to keep an eye on, my out-of-state republican friends would laugh at me. Then, by the end of the summer, things started becoming interesting…

The republican straw poll in Iowa planted the seed for what we see now: an impending Huckabee sweep of the Hawkeye state. Brownback dropped, the “front-runners” didn’t participate, and suddenly the only obstacle in capturing the attention of Iowa conservatives was a well-funded, flip-flopping, Mormon, New Englander whose support was broad but never deep.

Deja vu: our “joke”-of-a-former-governor is about to win Iowa.

Clarence Page cites an astonishing figure in today’s Chicago Tribune:

Of the likely Republican caucusgoers surveyed, Huckabee scored 29 percent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney scored 24 percent and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani scored 13 percent.

That’s got to be a jolt to Romney. He has been a front-runner for weeks in Iowa, where he has spent more than $7 million. Huckabee has spent only about $300,000. [emphasis added]

23:1 :: Romney:Huckabee.

Twenty three to one.

Huckabee has been underestimated his entire career. He’s a shock to Arkansas Democrats. He’s schooling Romney. If the Iowa media dominoes fall in ‘08 for the GOP like they did in ‘04 for the Democrats (as I think they will), he could easily be  the republican nominee.

When will Huckabee’s opponents learn to stop underestimating him?