What kind of "populist" is the Huck?

The Arkansas Times has an article on the Huck's Smarmy populism by Ernest Dumas (dated 01/10/08; accessed 01/09/08). The same issue features A populist charges across the Iowa prairie by John Williams as the cover story.

I've been reading in the liberal blogs about how down on the Huck the Republican Establishment supposedly is because of his "populist" streak. "Populist" is a much watered-down concept from the original in the late 19th century. But it still has somewhat of a vaguely democratic ring in America, whereas in Europe it tends to be applied to rightwing demagogues.

What kind of populist is the Huck, who Williams calls Brother Mike? (Baptist preachers are generally referred to as "Brother", not "Reverend".) Here's Williams' take. After quoting a description by Hunter Thompson of George Wallace in the 1972 campaign, he writes:

Huckabee is not substantially alien from the Alabama demagogue Thompson describes. The difference between Mike Huckabee and George Wallace is one of style. Huckabee does not yell and whip people into a frenzy — he cajoles and makes them forget themselves with laughter. Huckabee does not race-bait — no fish nibbling in that pond anymore — but he does tell them what they want to hear, regardless of how practical his proposal actually is. Like Wallace, his motive is personal advancement and his vehicle is expedient policy.

I don't mean to say that Mike Huckabee is an irredeemable phony. That would be a severe discredit to someone who has positions that clearly stem from his faith, inscrutable as they may be to me. Elimination of abortion and the sanctity of family is not a ploy to this man, but a deadly serious aspect of his worldview.

But in other matters — those distinct from meat-and-potatoes Christian conservative issues — Huckabee has made up policies on the fly in order to appeal to his target constituency. (my emphasis)

Dumas gives this example of the Huck's concern for working families:

While he has at times seemed to criticize his party and the Bush administration for favoring the rich and corporations with tax cuts instead of working people, he supported all the Bush tax cuts and says he would extend them when they run out. And while he maintains that his own crazy tax overhaul, a 30 percent national sales tax to replace most other individual and corporate taxes, would help the poor and middle class, it would instead be a massive shift of the fiscal burden from the very wealthy and corporations to working families.

On the Leno show last week, Huckabee explained why the sales tax would work so well: “First of all, you eliminate the underground economy. Everyone is paying [the tax]: drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers ...” His choice of examples is a perfect illustration of the plan's goofiness.

To keep the tax rate as low as 30 percent, the so-called Fair Tax does indeed depend on every last part of the retail economy collecting the tax for services rendered, including Huckabee's drug dealers, prostitutes and pimps. Exactly how many drug dealers do you think will remit a check to the U. S. Treasury every month? The appeal of the plan, as Huckabee always points out, is that there would be no IRS — no enforcement.

Non-compliance would be so massive, experts say, that the tax rate would have to be 50 percent on every transaction, maybe more. Take that, Joe Lunchbucket. (my emphasis)

That gives an expanded meaning to "sin taxes", doesn't it? Williams describes that gonzo tax proposal as perhaps the Huck's "greatest act of fakery". But he also reports that Brother Mike has high expectations for the Fair Tax, saying of it, "When the FairTax becomes law, it will be like waving a magic wand releasing us from pain and unfairness." Aren't Baptist preachers supposed to be opposed to magic?

Dumas discusses other issues in the Huck's "populism":

But the least convincing label is the latest one pinned on him by all the media: populist. How refreshing they find it that a Republican bleeds for the poor working stiff and rages against Wall Street and callous business. Huckabee has been quite amazing as the champion of the sunburned sons of toil and underdogs everywhere. Upon his victory in Iowa he revealed that he left preaching for politics when he realized that the nation's political leaders sided not with the workers who struggled to pay the family's light and doctor's bills but with the guy who handed them their pink slips. No successful Arkansas politician since Jeff Davis, the tribune of the haybinders, has sounded a more virulent populism even if it has a smarmy rather than a hard edge.

That would be Jeff Davis the Arkansas politician, not to be confused with Jefferson Davis, antebellum Mississippi Senator and President of the Confederate States of America.

It is unconvincing because nothing in his political past showed any particular sympathy for labor. His office interfered with the state Workers Compensation Commission, his administration's one point of contact with workers, to stack the commission against injured workers and their families and to oust hearing officers who tended to favor workers' claims. One unfair dismissal engineered by Huckabee cost the state $125,000. A Huckabee appointee to the commission said the governor's office ordered him to fire the hearing officer, and attorneys for Wal-Mart also pressured him because the woman had ruled against the company in a job-injury case.

His one claim for helping workers was the state minimum wage law in 2006, but business interests pleaded with him and the legislature to pass a minimum wage bill to block a much tougher version in a constitutional amendment that would have been on the ballot that fall.

The comparison with George Wallace may be unfair to Wallace, who arguably was more serious about programs to benefit working people.

See also the Arkansas Times blog post by Max Brantley on Mike Huckabee: Faux populist 01/09/08, who thinks that the Huck "gives populism a bad name".

Can liberal media critics please incorporate this stuff into your usage of the Huck as an example of how the Establishment press tries to shut out advocates for working people? Yes, Glenn Greenwald, this means you, e.g., Media hostility toward anti-establishment candidates 12/19/07:

Edwards, Paul and Huckabee are obviously disparate in significant ways - ideologically, temperamentally, and otherwise. But there is a vital attribute common to those three campaigns that explains the media's scorn: they are all, in their own ways, anti-establishment candidates, meaning they are outside and critical of the system of which national journalists are a critical part, the system which employs and rewards our journalists and forms the base of their identity and outlook. Any candidate who criticizes and opposes that system - not in piecemeal ways but fundamentally - will be, first, ignored and, then, treated as losers by the press. ...

Worse, whenever these candidates are discussed, it almost never entails any discussion of the critiques they are making. Is Edwards right that corporations and lobbyists dictate legislation in Washington and that this state of affairs is profoundly anti-democratic and corrupt? Are Paul's criticisms of our bipartisan imperial policies and his warnings of resulting financial unsustainability (and increasing anti-Americanism) accurate? Is Huckabee's claim true that the GOP has obliterated the economic prospects of its own middle- and lower-middle-class followers? Who knows. Who cares. One searches any media discussions in vain for mention of such matters. (my emphasis)

Greenwald is talking in that post about three candidates: John Edwards, who is campaigning as a New Deal Democrat with a pragmatic, liberal-internationalist foreign policy; Ron Paul, the Liebling (darling) of the white supremacist right, whose foreign policy consists of paranoid xenophobia and whose economic policies could be largely culled from John Birch Society pamphlets; and, Mike Huckabee, Republican Governor and theocrat who's in tight with the Christian dominionist crowd and who wants to move prisoners out of the Guantanamo Gulag because he thinks they have it way too easy there.

Lumping those three as "anti-establishment" doesn't really make much sense. It also contributes to this "populist" scam the Huck and Ron Paul are trying to run.

Tags: ernest dumas, john edwards, john williams, max brantley, mike huckabee, ron paul