The Huckabee Menace

Ben Weyl at the Iowa Independent has an excellent post on the not-quite-forgotten Mike Huckabee. As I've written before at this blog, and discussed recently at The Right's Field, Huckabee has enormous talents and is probably the conservative candidate best poised to thrive in a liberal era (to thrive as a conservative, not as a Schwarzenegger-style centrist).

Ben compares Huckabee's own rhetoric to the "Party of Sam's Club" ideas advocated by Ross Douthat and Reiham Salam, and puts them in the context of this analysis by liberal pollster Stanley Greenberg:

Huge majorities want the government to be more involved in a range of issues including national security, health care, energy, and the environment. To tackle global warming, two-thirds of Americans support stronger regulation of business. When it comes to health care, the results are dramatic. By a two-to-one margin, people opt for a universal health care system rather than separate reforms dealing with problems one at a time.

The Republican field in this cycle's presidential election has been pretty void of ideas so far. But it looks like there's a pretty natural match between what Huckabee is saying and what the conservative movement's smartest intellectuals are saying. Of course, they have the albatross of "big-government conservatism" around their necks, which may sink them, but I remain convinced that this kind of synchronicity is why Huckabee, should he somehow overcome his terrible fundraising and lousy poll numbers, would be a very dangerous candidate for Democrats -- someone who, as Ben says, could "steal much of their message and cut deeply into their natural constituency of working Americans."