And that's me, losing my religion.
In my initial attempts to sort out the GOP field, I pretty much ignored Mike Huckabee; the place he now 
occupies, as likely go-to guy for the religious right, I had pegged initially to Sam Brownback. But Brownback fizzled as Giulani, Romney and McCain burned... and as everyone flirted with the idea that Fred Thompson could unite the party. Now Thompson's in, the party's more fractured than before, and so it falls to the affable seeming Governor of Arkansas (and my, we've been down that road already haven't we - and I mean literally: Huckabee is also from a place called Hope) to take his place as the anointed one.
Read that as you will; one of Huckabee's best assets and worst tendencies is to overstate his religious cred the way Giuliani uses a noun, a verb, and 9/11 in almost every sentence. Huckabee has claimed to be the Christian leader this nation needs, and suggested at one forum that his success of late is proof of the power of prayer. As The Prospect says, God isn't just his co-pilot, He's also Huck's Iowa Field Director.
Before we get to Huckabee's recent rapid rise, though, we should talk about the guy who seems most rattled by it - Mitt Romney, who after watching his numbers hurt severely by Huckabee's success, caved in and gave "the speech" which was meant to be a discussion of his Mormon faith. That speech, much hyped, happened this afternnon in Texas, and it was, as things are with Romney, both more and less than anyone expected.
You can watch the speech here - if you haven't seen or listened to Romney I think it is a good moment to do so, because he's at his best, and yet much of what trips him up is also on display. What was billed as a discussion of his faith mentioned the word "Mormon" so far as I could tell exactly once, and never once
referred to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. As many expected, Romney didn't so much speak about his faith as he did about everyone else's - and if you fall into the major denominations, you pretty much got roped in, even Muslims (but not, interestingly, Hindus). Atheists and Agnostics need not apply.
Whether the speech helped or not is something that will probably take some time to sort out (even fans seem curiously unmoved); myself, I think it was pretty much irrelevant. The problem Romney has - which is a gut-level disagreement about the Mormon faith as being like other Christian faiths, a view that comes mainly from Evangelicals - can't be solved, really, certainly not without wading into arcane matters of which most Americans still seem blissfully unaware. (i still recommend PBS's The Mormons to anyone who'd like to know more.) These are not small issues, and they are not really understood by the major media - which, like my Mom, tends to find religion a little weird and off putting. Thus, the "Mormon question" often gets boiled down in reports to questions about LDS influence over Romney's decision making, which is pretty much a giant non-issue... or into discussions of things like polygamy, which are also not germane (LDS had to reject polygamy in order for Utah to enter the Union, and it is strictly illegal, which is why groups like the Warren Jeffs faction live on the edges of proper society, even Mormon society).
Romney's religious hurdle has never been about how Mormonism would be seen in the General Election - though a Mormon candidate would doubtless bring new scrutiny to the Church of LDS, its history and its practices - because although conservatives like to say liberals are hostile to religion, most lefties don't separate LDS from other missionary faiths like Evangelical Baptists. Those distinctions matter to the right, and it's why Romney's biggest hurdle has always been in the Republican primaries. If he makes it through, religion won't be the problem.
No, if Romney makes it through, there are plenty of other problems, mostly the ones that come from seeming like the least sincere man to run for President in a long, long time. As one wag (i wish I could remember which link it was, but I can't) put it, the religion speech could easily have been "my problem with religion is that you, the public, have not been clear about what you want to hear. When that is clear, I will be happy to say it to you." Lack of sincerity is what underlies pretty much all of Romney's problems, including the Mormon question (the attempts to airbrush Mormonism til it looks like some alternative to being Methodist won't fly) and even immigration (if Romney hadn't tried so hard to pander to anti-immigrationist primary voters, his undocumented gardener problem would be much less of an issue).
Which, in the end is a good indication of the appeal Mike Huckabee is basking in - say what you will, he seems sincere. Huckabee's got a literal "gee whiz, aw shucks" demeanor that goes a long way to papering over his problems - which are, mainly, that even mild scrutiny of the issues he's running on has something to turn off virtually everyone. Probably the biggest instant turnoff is his tax proposal, the so-called "Fair Tax" that would replace income taxes with a national sales tax, somewhere around 25 to 30%. This ludicrous proposal, which has floated for years under the radar in GOP circles (pushed most notably by Steve Forbes, another Never Was among candidates), is almost entirely unrealistic, and also, as one might guess, massively unpopular. Well, it usually gets people to toy with the idea... until you look closely and understand why the numbers (the size of the tax, for instance) have to be the way they are. The real problem can be summed up in four words: No More Mortgage Deduction. That alone tends to stop the thing cold.
But with Huckabee, tax problems are just the beginning: there's the absolutist anti-abortion stance to turn off pretty much all of the left; and the muddled immigration stance (though Huckabee is an "enforcement first" rightie, he pushed for an Arkansas version of the DREAM Act, which would have given in-state tuition even to children of undocumented immigrants). Then there's Huckabee's embarrassment over Wayne Dumond, a convicted rapist and murderer who Huckabee championed for early release from prison, only to have Dumond sexually assault and murder someone else in Missouri after his release. This murky story has just gotten murkier as Huckabee's star has risen since Thanksgiving.
So what is Huckabee's appeal? Well, mainly it's the embodiment of a "compassionate conservatism" that is more deeds, and less words, than that which emanated from George Bush in 2000. Huckabee speaks, sincerely and somewhat movingly, about championing the causes of the working class. His immigration stance, though unpopular, brings a measure of Christian decency to the discussion. Even Dumond speaks to a compassion for even the guiltiest of men, however misplaced.
Peter Beinart is right when he says to Jonah Goldberg here (yes another one of those discussions) that Huckabee has some appeal to the left for just this reason. But the deeper point is that the appeal of Huckabee to liberals is decidedly unserious (if he made it to the general, the abortion thing alone would wreck him... and with the tax proosal, he's pretty much DOA), and what he really signifies is the growing internal incoherence of the American right; where once Republicans basked in an uneasy coalition of social conservatism mixed with small government fiscal responsibility, lately the equation has simply gone out of whack. Candidates as fringe-y as Huckabee really is were usually given "fair hearing" in primaries (Pat Robertson, for one thing; Alan Keyes is another) and then gently pushed aside in favor of people, like the Bushes, with far less baggage, or weirdnesses. The tacit understanding is that these stand-ins would mouth the right socially conservative things, even if they didn't follow through.
In fact, they never followed through... and that's a big piece of why the coalition has fallen apart. In many ways, Romney should be leading the pack with little real trouble; compared to outliers like Giuliani or McCain, or even Ron Paul, Romney's package of decent family guy who says the right things when talking the conservative game should be a no-brainer... but almost no one believes anything the man says. And why should they? Even in today's speech, even when speaking, clearly very personally, about aspects of faith, Romney, at least to me, never lost that "too polished by half" quality that dogs him constantly - too finished, too likely to say what he thinks people want to hear, no real sense of just what it is he's ever believed in that motivates him... outside of his personal success. And yeah, that's kind of like a religion... just ask Joel Osteen. But it's not for all of us... it's for one of us. And with Huckabee's folksy sincerity serving as a counter appeal, an already messy GOP primary season becomes a fairly genuine crapshoot - any of these guys could be the guy who winds up being the nominee... and almost all of them seem certain to lose come the fall. Thank, um, God.
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