The Limits Of Mike Huckabee

American politics largely consists of a battle in which the "center" is defined in highly elitist terms, a mix of somewhat right-wing views on economic policy (willingness to contemplate some tax increases as long as they're paired with big spending cuts) paired with slightly left-wing views on social policy (abortion should be generally legal and gays and lesbians should have some rights but let's not push the envelop too quickly please!) leaving the other, more populist quadrant, vacant. Ross Douthat in his requiem for Mike Huckabee says he'll be missed precisely because he occupied that vacant zone:

This combination of views represents one of the plausible middle grounds in American politics. You can find it in the Republican Party, among the evangelicals and Catholics whose votes made the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush possible. You can find it among independent voters, particularly in what a recent Pew report calls the "disaffected" demographic, whose hostility to big government coexists with anxieties about corporate power and support for redistribution of wealth. And you find it in the Democratic Party as well — from the dwindling ranks of pro-life Catholic liberals to the "Bill Cosby conservatives" in the African-American middle class.

I had a rejoinder ready for this, but it came pre-acknowledged later in the column:

Of course, his 2008 campaign also reflected populism's inevitable flaw: a desperate lack of policy substance. Huckabee won votes by talking about issues that the other Republican candidates wouldn't touch, but his actual agenda was a grab bag of gimmicks and crank ideas. And nothing in his subsequent television career has indicated a strong interest in putting policy meat on the bones of his worldview.

But is this really an inevitable flaw of populism? I actually agree that it's an inevitable flaw in the thinking of a lot of people who I see out there calling for populism of one stripe or another. People have decided that the problem is the bankers and that what we need is a populist politician who'll call them out, but don't necessarily actually know what they want to see happen. And it's a mistake to make policy by emotional affiliation rather than dispassionate analysis. But is it actually impossible to combine the populist style with a more rigorous approach to substance? I'd say the John Edwards campaign in 2008 did a decent job. Obviously, his career's wound up being undone by sundry character problems. But the lack of heft to Mike Huckabee's national political persona is, in its way, equally a character problem and a more serious one: He doesn't seem to actually care. He'd rather talk about problems then think of solutions to them. He'd rather host a weekend television show than try to become president.