Anyone else out there looking at the potential nominees and wondering who sane Republicans will vote for? What if Huckabee gets the nomination? What if it's Huckabee vs. Obama? Huckabee vs. Clinton?
We have Republican friends here in the southern plains and up in the northeast who -- almost uniformly -- can't stand Bush, find the Patriot Acts and wiretapping to be a betrayal and the war in Iraq a moral as well as strategic failure, who have been stunned by the extent and depth of their national party's corruption, who are deeply uncomfortable with the influence of evangelicals on their party, and who are seriously concerned about the economy.
We're thinking of three Republicans in particular that we know fairly well, two in Texas and one in New York. We think that if the choice is between Huckabee and Clinton they'll somewhat reluctantly vote for Huckabee but if Obama is the Democratic candidate they'll cross over. We also note that "black" is not something a lot of people we know give weight to in this contest -- something we haven't seen mentioned much in the media.
Frank Rich takes note of something else we haven't seen much mention of: the age factor. Huckabee and Obama are the two youngest candidates. An awful lot of people who are aching for "change" see their relative youth as attractive.
So when you're shaking your head over Huckabee, think about what Frank Rich has to say in today's Times.
What really may be going on here is a mirror image of the phenomenon that has upended Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability” among Democrats. Like Senator Obama, Mr. Huckabee is the youngest in his party’s field. (At 52, he’s also younger than every Democratic contender except Mr. Obama, who is 46.) Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines. Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.
Though their views on issues are often antithetical, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Obama may be united in catching the wave of an emerging zeitgeist that is larger than either party’s ideology. An exhausted and disillusioned public may be ready for a replay of the New Frontier pitch of 1960. That pitch won’t come from Mr. Romney, a glib salesman who seems a dead ringer for Don Draper, a Madison Avenue ad man of no known core convictions who works on the Nixon campaign in the TV series, “Mad Men.” Mr. Romney’s effort to channel J.F.K. last week, in which he mentioned the word Mormon exactly once, was hardly a profile in courage.
The fact to remember about Mr. Huckabee’s polling spike is that it occurred just after the G.O.P. YouTube debate on CNN, where Mr. Romney and Rudy Giuliani vied to spray the most spittle at illegal immigrants. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, the fringe candidate whose most recent ads accuse the invading hordes of “pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives,” accurately accused his opponents of trying to “out-Tancredo Tancredo.”
Next to this mean-spiritedness, Mr. Huckabee’s tone leapt off the screen.
And as for experience, Rich is right on target. In some respects, "experience" may be a negative, may connote too-goddam-much time in Washington. "Inevitability," like Hillary's, may be horribly reminiscent of Bush's certainty that he had won in Florida -- an "inevitability" that sure sounded and looked like "we've got this election fixed." Anyway, if "experience" is such a big deal to so many people,why are so many candidates with long experience languishing in the second and third tiers?
The most experienced candidate in 2008 is not Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Romney in any case. It’s Mr. McCain, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson who have the longest résumés. Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Obama, meanwhile, are both betting that this is another crossroads, like 1960, when Americans are hungry for a leader who will refocus the nation on the path ahead.
