Huckabee – Memphis Flyer

IN TRANSIT FROM DES MOINES TO MANCHESTER –On their last day of campaigning for the Iowa caucuses and with the New Hampshire and South Carolina tests looming, the
two bona fide Southern hopefuls in the Republican presidential field had
personas that meshed in important particulars and diverged in others.

Ditto with their destinies: Former Arkansas governor Mike
Huckabee famously finished first in GOP ranks, while ex-Tennessee senator Fred
Thompson managed a distant third. That’s the divergence; the mesh is that
neither is out of the woods, but both are still in the game.

No sooner had Huckabee finished off his up-from-nothing
miracle in Iowa than such bell cows of the Christian right as Richard Viguerie
were trying to disown him. Not for doctrinal heresies of the religious sort but
for deviation from the tax-cutting priorities of the Republican Party elite.
Viguerie, who a generation ago assisted greatly in fusing the social and
economic conservatisms of the Reagan era, essentially accused Huckabee – an
economic populist who dares to assail “Wall Street Republicans” — of sawing off
the economic leg of that coalition.

This refrain was promptly parroted by that cockatee of the
airwaves, Rush Limbaugh – prompting a brief back-and-forth between himself and
the candidate, who, unlike so many other name Republicans, doesn’t mind pulling
on such feathers.

Huckabee is a threat to an established order, and, just as
establishment Democrats, assisted by the establishment media, were able to kill
off Howard Dean’s hopes in 2004, so might the GOP hierarchy do likewise to those
of the Republican heresiarch – his first-place finish in Iowa notwithstanding.

As for Thompson, the line on him for several months has
been that the actor/politician from Tennessee had fallen way short of the
enormous ballyhoo of his advance billing and long ago flunked his audition.

Indeed, Thompson has played the role assigned him every way
but right. He has looked haggard, fumbled his lines, and done everything a
starring player shouldn’t. Coming from the same moderate tradition (and stable)
as fellow Tennessee Republicans Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander, he was billed
as a conservative’s conservative – the kind who could put to rest the fears of
Viguerie and Limbaugh and suchlike who see George W. Bush’s house of cards – and
thereby the party’s generational dominance of American affairs – hopelessly
aquiver.

However late in the day, Thompson has seemingly found his
motivation for such a role and learned to play it. That was the conclusion one
could draw from the barn-burner he delivered to a packed room at the West Des
Moines Marriott on Thursday morning, the day of the caucuses. So strong a
showing it was, so animated the reception from his audience that it seemed
obvious that Thompson, like one of those Miss America alternates, was a
potential standby in case of trouble with the GOP frontrunner.

Any frontrunner – be it Huckabee or the resurgent
John McCain or Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani or whoever. All he had to do was
survive by fnishing third in Iowa – which, by the skin of those thespian
pearly-whites, he did.

As if in recognition of their doppelganger status, both men
ended their appeals to voters in Iowa with overlapping thematics: “

Thompson: “This is a country where a country boy or
girl in Tennessee or Iowa or anywhere else can grow up and have a pretty good
chance at the American dream.

Huckabee: “If American can elect me as president, if
means that the dreams of this country can come true for anybody.

Thompson: “I’ve got a 100-percent pro-life voting
record. I’ve always been pro-life. That’s why so many right-to-life
organizations have endorsed me.

Huckabee: “I’m pro-life. It’s not a position that
the pollsters gave me last week. I’ve been saying this all my life. Check me
out. I’m not pro-life because I’m political. I’m political because I’m
pro-life.”

Thompson: “What you see is what you get I don’t
think I’ve ever been accused of flip-flopping or choosing my positions on issues
to win an election.”

Huckabee: “You need to believe that someone is
telling you the truth, who’ll be honest with you We need a president who
believes something and will do what he believes.”

Thompson: “Our best days are still before us.”

Huckabee: “I want the best generation to be then one
that hasn’t been born yet”

Thompson: “We need to unite as Republicans and reach
out and get some independents and Reagan Democrats.”

Huckabee: “We need to have [with us] not just a
Republican Party but we need a country.”

Thompson:Tonight is important…We’ve got to show them Let’s go out and shock
the world.

Huckabee: Tonight we can make a statement heard all
over the world. Your grandchildren will be saying, were you there that
night that guy nobody had ever heard of won the presidency?

And in fact: If Thompson recovers from his long limbo in
the presidential race and becomes his party’s candidate of last resort, he will
indeed shock the world. For that matter, if Huckabee can continue riding
his current star and build on his triumph in Iowa to be the nominee, that outcome,
too, will resound all over the world.

To repeat: There are differences between the men and differences
between the candidacies. That is the very point. Only one of them could have said this on
Thursday: “The big-government, left-wing, high-taxes, weak-on-security
Democratic Party is just salivating about taking the reins and the power just so
they can kinda roll to a welfare state. And we’re not going to let that happen”

That was Thompson the D.A., of course, heaping on the red meat, knowing what
his role is now. Huckabee, the ex-preacher, is smoother, milder, in a curious way genuinely ecumencial. When he jammed with a local rock band in Hennick on his first
day in New Hampshire after the Iowa vote, he ended up playing bass with evident gusto on “Put a
Little Love in Your Heart” and even on the old to-the-barricades stomper from Creedence, “Fortunate Son.”
He, too, knows what his role is.

Watching what happens to either of them from now on is
going to be good theater.

(Flyer political editor Jackson Baker, having followed the presidential-campaign circus out of Iowa, continues his reporting from New Hampshire for the next few days.)

DES MOINES, IA –“They’re all a bunch of goops,” said the
check-out lady at QuikTrip [sic], the Interstate 80 truck stop that doubles as a
passing-good deli. Meaning politicians. And someone suggested to her that this
was exactly why Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee had just won
their party’s caucuses in Iowa so handily.

Neither is the same old goop. A mixed-marriage
son of Kenya and Kansas on the one hand. A Baptist preacher with a yen for
populist economics on the other. Each articulate to a preternatural degree.
Each appealing, both overtly and by their very beings, to the political
crossover vote. Each defeating his main opponent by the margin of 9 percent.

Each an example of the improbable proving
inevitable, in victor Obama’s phrase.

“We are one nation. We are one people. And our
time for change has come,” the Democratic victor said, in a speech that touched
so many bases and was said so well that it put to shame his 2004 convention
speech – the one that put the then new senator from Illinois on the map.

Yes, Obama won the “youth” vote
— .57 percent of the under-30’s – and Huckabee got the evangelicals – 45
percent of a base that, in Iowa, amounted to 60 percent of caucus-goers overall.
But both are – how to say it? – bigger than that. And each made a point of
talking up inclusiveness as the foundation of their Iowa victories and of the
election to come and the political era that comes after it.

To be sure, Hillary Clinton has
too deep a war chest and too deep a bench, organizationally, to bow out. One
remembers longtime Clinton retainer James Carville’s cry when the Monica
Lewinsky scandal threatened to overwhelm Bill Clinton’s presidency: “This is wah!”
he shouted out in full South Loos-iana Cajunese. Whereupon he – and the Clintons – fetched up the ordnance to win
that war.

Hillary will try again. But,
beyond the fact that she’s up against a man who could be a generational
phenomenon, she has also to contend with the second-place finisher in the
Democratic race, former senator John Edwards, who has so unabashedly talked about “corporate greed” and promised
what Republicans like to call “class war.”

“On to New Hampshire,” vowed
Edwards to a turnaway crowd at the Renaissance-Savery Hotel in downtown Des
Moines. And what that meant was spelled out afterward by the candidate’s chief
economic-policy advisor, Leo Hindery: “We beat the Clinton machine. And we’ll
beat it again,” he said. No mention of Obama.

And Huckabee had left no doubt in
the last few days of campaigning, nor in his speech to his throng Thursday
night, that his pending triumph over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney
was a victory of ordinary folks over the elite, of truth over dissembling, and
of will over money. He never tired of pointing out that Romney out-spent him
“20-to-one,” and it was obviously his former fellow governor – and onetime
moderate turned conservative exemplar — that he meant when he used words like
“phony” and “pretender” on the stump.

Speaking of exemplars, the
apparent third-place finisher among Republicans, former Tennessee senator Fred
Thompson, materialized as something of a conservative firebrand Thursday
morning in a barn-burning speech to a packed room at a West Des Moines hotel.
For a change this campaign year, he was focused, intense, and capable of a sense
of humor (he was seen so frequently in the movies, he said, because “they
need[ed] somebody who was big and worked cheap”).

Both Thompson and his longtime
friend John McCain, the given-up-for-dead onetime frontrunner who has surged
again, finished in a virtual dead heat for third place in Iowa, and each has
thereby won a ticket to New Hampshire. McCain, a possible winner there, has
gotten most of the attention, but Thompson is a legitimate substitute either for
Huckabee, should he falter, or for McCain, if the Republican establishment
proves unreceptive to the maverick hero again, as it did in 2000.

“You have done what the cynics said we couldn’t
do. You have done what New Hampshire can do in five days,” said Obama Thursday
night, looking ahead. As for Huckabee, he’ll hope to score well in New
Hampshire, but it’s more likely that he’ll be looking at South Carolina later in
January, to finish off Romney – and whomever else is still out there, including
McCain, with whom he, too, like Thompson, still has a mutual-admiration-society
relationship.

One way in which pundits are still
underestimating Huckabee is in concentrating so totally on his evangelical
persuasion and skimming over, or ignoring altogether, his populism. “Republicans
have economic concerns,” Huckabee stressed Thursday night, and he didn’t mean
the high-bracket tax-cut crowd. He talked instead about working families
struggling to pay for gasoline at the pump.

As Obama said, “People are looking for someone
who is willing to say the unorthodox – and [for] authenticity.” Or, as a
still-game Edwards put it, “One thing is clear from the results tonight. The
status quo lost and change won.”

Indeed so. And there is more to come.

(Flyer political editor Jackson Baker will be
reporting regularly from Iowa and New Hampshire for the next few days.)