The Left Versus The Left

Mark Steyn takes a look at Mike Huckabee's victory in Iowa. He isn't particularly happy about it – but he also points out that if it comes down to Huckabee versus Obama, he would not count Huckabee out.

As for Huckabee, the thinking on the right is that the mainstream media are boosting him up because he's the Republican who'll be easiest to beat. It's undoubtedly true that they see him as the designated pushover, but in that they're wrong. If Iowa's choice becomes the nation's, and it's Huckabee vs. Obama this November, I'd bet on Huck.

As governor, as preacher and even as disc jockey, he's spent his life in professions that depend on connecting with an audience, and he's very good at it. His gag on "The Tonight Show" – "People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off" – had a kind of brilliance: True, it is cornball at one level (imagine John Edwards doing it with all his smarmy sanctimoniousness) but it also devastatingly cuts to the core of the difference between him and Mitt Romney. It's a disc-jockey line: the morning man on the radio is a guy doing a tricky job – he's a celebrity trying to pass himself off as a regular joe – which is pretty much what the presidential candidate has to do, too. Huckabee's good at that.

I don't know whether the Jay Leno shtick was written for him by a professional, but, if so, by the time it came out of his mouth it sounded like him. When Huck's campaign honcho, Ed Rollins, revealed the other day that he wanted to punch Romney in the teeth, Mitt had a good comeback: "I have just one thing to say to Mr. Rollins," he began. "Please, don't touch the hair." Funny line – but it sounds like a line, like something written by a professional and then put in his mouth.

This is the Huckabee advantage. On stage, he's quick-witted and thinks on his feet. He's not paralyzed by consultants and trimmers and triangulators. Put him in a presidential debate, and he'll have sharper ripostes and funnier throwaways and more plausible self-deprecating quips than anyone on the other side. He'll be a great campaigner. The problems begin when he stops campaigning and starts governing.

I'll send you over there to read the whole thing. Steyn is, as always, difficult to excerpt because it is all so good. He sees the Iowa results as victories for the secular left with Obama and what he is calling the religious left with Huckabee. He does not like those choices.