Democrats Beware: An Economic Populist Is Rising In the GOP's Presidential Primary

Leave it to the New York Times' crack campaign team to take what is a truly interesting story from the Republican presidential primary and boil it down into an uninteresting, hackneyed attempt to mimic People magazine-style nonsense (Suggestion for a new Times slogan: All the fluff that's fit to print). The Gray Lady - like almost every other major news outlet that is covering the campaign - uses former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's (R) surprising second-place finish in the Iowa Straw Poll as an excuse to write not about the unique nature of Huckabee's substantive message, but to make the claim that the only reason he is getting ahead is because his "humor amounts to a style of politicking that many audiences have found engaging."

I'm not saying Huckabee isn't funny, but I am saying that he also has an extraordinarily different message than any of the other Republican presidential contenders - a populist economic message that may be shunned by conservative operatives and K Street lobbyists in the GOP-dominated Money Party in Washington, but likely has an appeal among rank-and-file working-class Republican voters. Though Beltway reporters are too insulated in their cliched views of politics to see how this economic populist appeal may be fueling Huckabee's candidacy, it is a phenomenon Democrats should be well aware of if they want to win the White House in 2008.

Here is Huckabee quoted on the AFL-CIO's webpage from the recent Republican presidential debate:

"The most important thing a president needs to do is to make it clear that we're not going to continue to see jobs shipped overseas, jobs that are lost by American workers, many in their 50s who for 20 and 30 years have worked to make a company rich, and then watch as a CEO takes a $100 million bonus to jettison those American jobs somewhere else. And the worker not only loses his job, but he loses his pension. That's criminal. It's wrong."

Huckabee followed this up by telling The Politico: "I am not interested in being the candidate of Wall Street but of Main Street. Wealthy CEOs get paid 500 times what the average worker does, but they are not necessarily 500 times smarter or harder working and that is wrong."

On trade, it's the same thing. Here's Huckabee at a recent campaign stop in Iowa:

"If somebody in the presidency doesn't begin to understand that we can't have free trade if it's not fair trade, we're going to continually see people who have worked for 20 and 30 years for companies one day walk in and get the pink slip and told 'I'm sorry but everything you spent your life working for is no longer here.'…I'd like to prove that this presidency is not going to be just up for sale. If that's the case, let's just put it on eBay and be done with it. I'd like to think it's going to be more about our principles, not just our pockets."

Even on health care, Huckabee populist line seems to be working with GOP audiences. Notice this report from Raw Story:

"If you want to know how to fix it, I've got a solution," Huckabee said at the Republican debate. "Either give every American the same kind of healthcare that Congress has or make Congress have the same kind of health care that every American has." As he spoke, the electronic graphs rose dramatically for both moderate and conservative Republicans, from a neutral reading of 50 into the 80's.

This language sounds more populist and more tough than many (if not most) Democrats in Washington. And remember - Huckabee is no stranger to going against the economic orthodoxy of the Republican cabal in Washington. He signed a minimum wage hike and a statewide smoking ban in Arkansas, raising the ire of the fringe right-wing Club for Growth. When Grover Norquist's corporate front-group attacked Huckabee for his refusal to slash some state health care programs, Huckabee all but called Norquist an out-of-touch Washington insider in a meeting with the right-wing Washington Times: