Huckabee?

Several early Thompson supporters, apparently suffering buyer's remorse, have decided to switch their support to Huckabee. Their reasons are detailed here, and they have obviously thought this decision through. Huckabee is articulate, at ease with himself, an attractive personality, and very good on many issues.

Nevertheless, I think they are destined to be disappointed. It isn't just that Huckabee is probably un-nominatable and un-electable, but that he is less desirable than Thompson [and probably others] on policy grounds. Evangelicals care most intensely about abortion, but the likelihood that a President can do anything about that issue depends on his getting elected - and that depends on a great many other factors - and issues. Huckabee has obvious problems with conservatives on some of them, immigration being one of the most salient in this cycle. There are others. Paul Mirengoff at Power Line:

...[M]any hard-core conservatives doubt his bona fides as a fiscal conservative and/or as a potential leader of the war on terror. The problem isn't just that Huckabee makes statements like "we broke Iraq" and seems to lack a strong sense of urgency when it comes to Iraq It's more that he simply doesn't come across as the man one would want to lead this country in a global war.

A sense of his approach to governing may be indicated by his support for "nanny-state" proposals like a national smoking ban. His proposal for tax reform is also probably unworkable and politically a non-starter.

Huckabee's most serious problems may arise as he is subjected to the increasing focus of the national media. Quin Hillyer, who is familiar with Arkansas politics, raises some of the potential issues in an article in The American Spectator here, and then writes:

All of which leads one to ask two questions: First, how can voters whose primary concerns are moral look beyond so many of a candidate's problems with ethics? And, second, if Republicans in general have concluded, as most of them have, that repeated scandals among Washington GOPers played a huge role in Republican defeats in 2006, how could they possibly nominate somebody who seems to have such big ethical blind spots? ....

For that matter, if the question is public ethics, all the other major Republican candidates have rather solid records. With so little scandalous material to look into, why hasn't the usually scandal-ravenous national media delved into the record of the one GOP candidate whose ethics have been repeatedly questioned in his home state? [more, and a response from the Huckabee campaign here]

My biggest fear is that by not unifying behind a candidate who might actually win, social conservatives will end up having to choose between Giuliani and Clinton in November of 2008. That choice would be easy for me, but I would much prefer to have a better one.

Update: Huckabee has risen some in the Rasmussen poll [emphasis added]:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows a very tight race for the Republican Presidential Nomination. Rudy Giuliani is now supported by 21% while Fred Thompson is the top choice for 19%. Seventeen percent (17%) are undecided while John McCain moves into third place among the candidates with at 14% of the vote. Mitt Romney’s support is back down to 12%, Mike Huckabee reaches double digits for the first time at 10%, and Ron Paul earns the vote from 3%.Is this a boom or merely a boomlet?

Update 10/26: John Fund writes today about Huckabee, and it shouldn't be encouraging to conservatives of any stripe. He concludes:

Many Huckabee supporters have told me their man should be judged by what he's saying on the campaign trail today. Fair enough. Mr. Huckabee was the only GOP candidate to refuse to endorse President Bush's veto of the Democrats' bill to vastly expand the Schip health-care program. Only he and John McCain have endorsed the discredited cap-and-trade system to limit global-warming emissions that has proved a fiasco in Europe.

"It goes to the moral issue," he told an admiring group of environmentalists this month. Alan Greenspan blasts cap-and-trade in his new book as not feasible, noting that "jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained." Mr. Huckabee defends his plan as an "innovative" way to attain complete energy independence from foreign oil by 2013.

During a visit to the Journal last spring, Mr. Huckabee joked that one of his biggest challenges is that "like Bill Clinton I hail from Hope, Arkansas, and not every Republican wants to take a chance like that again." But it's Mr. Huckabee who is creating the doubts. "He's just like Bill Clinton in that he practices management by news cycle," a former top Huckabee aide told me. "As with Clinton there was no long-term planning, just putting out fires on a daily basis. One thing I'll guarantee is that won't lead to competent conservative governance."

The American Spectator: A Tale of Two Candidates