WASHINGTON -- The refusal of Mike Huckabee to enter the 2012 presidential race leaves a gap -- and not just a gap of social conservatism. Huckabee was also the Republican Party's leading practitioner of economic populism.
Compared to his GOP rivals four years ago, Huckabee sounded like William Jennings Bryan -- a comparison that would probably offend Huckabee less than it would most Republicans. He complained about overpaid CEOs and talked sympathetically of "people at the lower ends of the economic scale." His own up-from-poverty struggle lent credibility to his message.
Free-market purists went hard after Huckabee's record as Arkansas governor -- his tax increases, his statewide smoking ban, his 21 percent increase in the state minimum wage. Conservative activist Richard Viguerie tagged him a "Christian socialist."
But Huckabee gave at least as good as he got. His dismissed the libertarian Club for Growth, which ran ads against him, as the "club for greed." After an attack by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Huckabee responded, "Grover's never been in government, doesn't have to balance a state budget. ... Grover's never been in a situation where he couldn't borrow money so he didn't have to raise taxes or tell old people he's just going to take them out of the nursing home and drop them on the curb."
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