Here's an interesting piece in the New Yorker about 2008 GOP hopeful Mike Huckabee...
It's a bit long, but an interesting profile nonetheless, examining the former Baptist preacher and Arkansas Governor's weird – and at times, strained – relationship with the Republican Party and Evangelical Christianity.
Here's the nut though (and as usual for a long New Yorker article, buried at the very end):
Mike Huckabee will always be too weird for the Old Guard of his party. But the Party is a fractured and dispersed association at this point. No clear Republican front-runner has emerged for the next Presidential race. Palin quit her only substantive job in government and has not hired establishment players to reshape her as a more mainstream candidate; even less Presidentially, she is going to be the star of a reality television show. Mitt Romney, who won the straw poll at the Southern Republican Leadership conference, in April, is regarded by some Republicans as a flip-flopper, and his Mormonism is a liability. Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, has the powerful support of Rush Limbaugh, but he is only halfway through his first term and, assuming he wins reelection in 2011, would have to abandon office almost immediately to start campaigning for President. Haley Barbour has the potential to consolidate establishment support, but it’s still not clear that he intends to run. Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, announced that he will not run for reelection, which has been interpreted to mean that he has his eyes on the Presidency, but he is seen by some in his party as too liberal.
Steve Schmidt told me, “Really, there’s three primaries within the Republican primary. There’s the primary that’s the evangelical wing of the Party, there’s the establishment primary, and there’s usually a maverick of an insurgent category. Whoever occupies two out of the three is the nominee.” It would not take a packaging genius to put Huckabee out as an evangelical insurgent. The next election will cost billions of dollars, and Huckabee is not much of a traditional fund-raiser. But raising money for the primaries in 2012 could have as much to do with getting people to click a button on their BlackBerry to contribute ten dollars as it does with working the corporate Washington cocktail circuit.
Mainstream Republicans turned off by the politics of rage from the teabaggers, yet tired of the Wall Street establishment Republicans telling them all be well as long as their quarterly numbers continue to need scientific notation to express on a single sheet of paper (and that's, y'know, pretty big numbers...) might be looking for an alternative to the usual suspects that are going to be trotted out by, well, the usual suspects.
The only question will be money. Can he get it? If he were smart, and I believe he probably is, he would look at what Howard Dean did in 1999 and 2000. He rose immense amounts of money, which in the pre-primary months propelled him from dark horse gadfly candidate to presumptive front runner.
That campaign imploded for a number of reasons, but lack of cash wasn't one of them... Time to watch Huckabee is doing? Yeah, I think so...
mojo sends
