Real Kato Blog: Mike Huckabee

Continuing my series on presidential candidates, here's my look at Mike Huckabee.

"Mike Huckabee? He's the second Republican you're writing about? Really?" Really. Of the crowded Republican field (with no less than five legitimate contenders), Huckabee is the one with all the momentum. He's leading in Iowa polls; a few months ago, that would have seemed inconceivable.

Huckabee has been governor of Arkansas since 1996. But he's better-known for two things: one, he's a Southern Baptist minister; two, he lost 120 pounds in two years, after being diagnosed with adult onset diabetes. That makes him a hero to Christian conservatives and a legion of overweight voters.

He has a folksy kind of charm and a populist message that resonates with a lot of voters, and that may explain his rapid rise in the polls. But he's not exactly a conservative in the mold of Ronald Reagan. You might call him an anti-libertarian, a guy who shows preference for a broadly paternalistic government. His record as governor shows he's not afraid of increasing taxes and spending, and that makes fiscal conservatives cringe. In 2006, he received an "F" on taxes and spending policy from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

In addition, he's generally in favor of social programs for unregistered immigrants, and also for "paths towards citizenship". That may partly be a political move to appeal to his state's large immigrant population, but it's also partly because he considers it "un-Christian" to deny benefits to people simply because of their backgrounds.

So clearly, he won't draw much support from the über-nationalists, the libertarians, or the pro-business fiscal conservatives. No, his support comes from the values-oriented Christian middle class, searching for someone appropriately anti-abortion and anti-gay. You'll find a lot of that crowd throughout the bread-basket Midwest and the suburbs of the South.

Can he win a general election? I tend to think not. Despite our two-party system, the typical American is a little bit libertarian at heart. Most people have some distrust of government, and even though we're a religious nation, I'm not sure we're ready to have a religious leader as a political leader.

My take on him is that he wouldn't be an absolute disaster as president; he seems reasonably smart and diplomatic, and I think his compassion would lead to policies that benefit a lot of people. But his tendency to mix religion and politics makes me very wary. Public policy should be based on secular factors, doing what's best in terms of social justice and economics; that's not always the same as what religion would dictate.

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