Iowa: “The Change” That Is or Is Not Huckabee
January 3rd, 2008
By ROBIN KOERNER
I’m enjoying my first Caucus. That makes me a preschooler, or someone who arrived in the US less than four years ago. You can vote later.
A couple of things strike me about this evening. The first doesn’t surprise me much, but the second is truly tantalizing.
One of the United States’ greatest institutions, I quickly discovered after arriving in California back in late ’04, is C-span. Back then, the station was filming a series of classes on the Clinton presidency at a college in Little Rock, AR. They had some very high-powered guest lecturers and in one of those classes, one of them - I am rather sure it was Bill Clinton himself - said that winning candidates do not really win elections: rather, they avoid losing them. Success, he indicated, is in not being disliked by too many people. The comment has a strong ring of truth and, ironically, strongly informs my belief, held for a while, that his wife was going to struggle and will not be the next president of the U.S..
Moreover, it was not just her third-place showing in the Democratic caucuses, but also her response thereto, that reinforces my expectation. I may have been hearing something that wasn’t there, but Hilary’s repeated refrains of “I am so ready” and “I am your candidate” in her concession speech brought to mind a little Shakespeare: “the lady dost protesteth too much, methinks” – and in its original meaning, too.
Much more tantalizing is Huckabee’s resounding success – or rather, Huckabee himself. Intriguing to me perhaps because of how much I instinctively like him but am unready to trust him. I’ve never subscribed to voting for policy over personality: history (especially recent history) is clear that true leadership depends mostly on the ability and integrity to deal with the unexpected, the uncontrollable and the uncertain – the stuff that falls outside a politicians’ policy-preferences and passions. Such ability and integrity are founded in the the core of the person, and decidedly not in the policies he or she happens to prefer in an ideal world. Accordingly, I prefer transparent candidates who are – or at least appear to me to be - nothing more than themselves, damning the torpedoes along the way – even if I disagree with them passionately on a particular policy.
Huckabee has that rare but unmistakable easiness of a person who is secure and content with himself. It is manifest in at least two important ways. One is the radicalism of some of his proposals. For example, his fair tax and accompanying abolition of the IRS represent one of the most radical policy proposals of recent times from a presidential candidate - both practically and philosophically. Clearly, Huckabee has political conviction and nerve.
His genuine self-confidence has another manifestation – which Bill Clinton, again, identified recently when he said that he was unsurprised at Huckabee’s rise in the Republican Party because he was “the only Republican candidate who can give a speech and tell a joke”. That makes Huckabee almost sound like a Republican’s Clinton! No bad thing: whatever Republicans may think of Bill Clinton, those communication skills can do nothing but good post-Bush.
So what’s the problem? As I recall, Bush was also the best candidate with whom to have a beer not too long ago. Didn’t people love how down-to-earth he was? And most worryingly, weren’t Bush’s wins, like Huckabee’s tonight, at the hands of religionists and for exactly the same reasons? Given all of that, the reasons I like Huckabee start to scare me. After all, the man who seems the least dangerous is the one who can do the most damage.
Huckabee’s candidacy, like Obama’s, is based overtly on a desire for change. For the reason Bill Clinton observed, I will not be surprised if Huckabee becomes the Republican presidential nominee. And if he does, I will want to like him politically because I like him personally, but I will be watching uneasily to see if he’s God’s man or his own - because if the former, half of America will be voting for the change that will change nothing at all.
For now, I’ll give Mike the benefit of the doubt and the last word: “People are looking for authenticity – not necessarily someone who just goes straight down the line of their own personal doctrine”. America needs him to be right.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Newsweek Blogitics, 2008 Elections, Politics. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
