Views » January 11, 2008 » Web Only

Stay Classy, Huckabee

By David Sirota

“The uncool subject is class,” author Bell Hooks once wrote. “It’s the subject that makes us all tense.” What an understatement, considering the two leading “change” candidates in the latest presidential polls.

Barack Obama is contending for the Democratic nomination as a candidate who avoids focusing on economic class. He asks us to believe — nay, to “hope” — that the interests of Wall Streeters underwriting his campaign can somehow be “brought together” with the interests of workers harmed by corporate America’s wage, job and pension cutbacks.

By contrast, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is competing for the Republican nomination on a call for proletarian solidarity. Next to John Edwards (D), he is the “classiest” presidential candidate, explicitly deriding “plutocracy” and “the Club for Greed” that he correctly says runs Washington.

“There’s a great need in this country to elect someone who reminds [voters] of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off,” Huckabee thunders.

This is taboo territory. Though the Wall Street Journal reports that America has among the lowest class mobility in the industrialized world, the Establishment stifles discussion about class. Why? Because those controlling the debate — from television anchors to political donors to campaign consultants — are among the wealthiest members of what Huckabee calls “the ruling class.” They have an obvious self-interest in pretending class does not exist.

Not surprisingly, officialdom has reacted quite differently to the Obama and Huckabee phenomena.

The ruling class roundly praises Obama’s class-averse campaign. Even George Will, the columnist-spokesman for country club Republicanism, effused that Obama is “refreshingly cerebral.”

Will lambastes Huckabee as “an adolescent” for daring to “lament a shrinking middle class.” Such vitriol is commonplace, from the National Review calling the Republican candidate “deeply naive” to Time’s Joe Klein praying for a “monumental implosion” of Huckabee’s campaign.

To those with money and power, Huckabee is committing the worst sin. His class rhetoric puts his Christian religion’s altruistic, meek-shall-inherit-the-Earth tenets above Washington’s free market fundamentalism. And the cultural roots accompanying Huckabee’s cause are even more appalling to the limousine crowd. This Republican apostate is not an Ivy Leaguer putting on a wink-and-nod show. He’s a former Baptist minister from a low-income family who was never scrubbed by an elite brush — meaning he might actually believe in his class crusade.

This explains not just the difference in treatment of the Harvard-educated Obama and the Ouachita Baptist University-educated Huckabee, but an even more revealing hypocrisy involving President Bush.

Recall that the media portrays Bush’s alliance with the religious right as proof of his convictions. Huckabee’s alliance with the same religious right is subtly cast as a sign of supposed ignorance. Bush’s rhetorical gaffes are often painted as endearing — evidence that despite his silver-spoon pedigree, he is the authentic “average American man” thinking “in a common-sense way,” as Republican commentator Peggy Noonan wrote. Huckabee? The Weekly Standard calls him “a village idiot” and a “rube,” •while Noonan derides him for “populist manipulation.”

Bush, you see, was always an aristocrat underneath the “windshield cowboy” veneer. He is the son of a president, a Skull-and-Bones man — ruling class all the way.

Huckabee, on the other hand, is a real-life regular guy. He views religion as more than just a convenient political cudgel, truly did pull himself “up from the bootstraps” — and his class grievances are personal. The well-heeled narcissists in the media and political Establishment are appalled. They see Huckabee as a country bumpkin getting uppity.

As UCLA professor Mark Kleiman wrote, “If you went to Harvard, it’s plain embarrassing to say you’re going to vote for someone as, well, unwashed, as Huckabee.”

Certainly, Obama’s underlying policy platform is good for working-class America — and better than Huckabee’s, which is led by a punishingly regressive tax proposal.

However, the campaigns’ rhetorical themes are critical to consider because they impact what will — and will not — be acceptable topics of political debate in the post-Bush era.

Personally, I want to believe Obama’s vision of America as a class-free utopia where change comes without rancor or division. But history shows that most positive change in America has been about class and conflict — whether it was the battle for basic labor laws or the fight for Social Security.

That’s why, whoever wins the primaries, the more class forces its way onto the presidential stage, the better.

In short, stay classy, Mike Huckabee.

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• Reader Comments

  Giving him bonafides regarding his rhetoric is short sighted.  It tricks a great many people into thinking that he is a populist.  As you said his economic proposals are anything but.  Years from now how many republicans who became politically conscious during this election will think that populism is compatible with the Fair Tax policy?  Applying terms like ‘populist’ or ‘class warrior’ or anything like that to Huckabee robs the terms of their meaning.  It streches the concept so far that nothing is left except to being a populist or working class advocate except appealing to the lower class for votes.  On that notion the Southern Strategy is a populist one, when it was actually an attempt to split working class votes by appealing to southern racism.

  The ‘populist’ label is a stretch for Edwards and is absurd when applied to Huckabee.  There is a tendency to call Huckabee’s campaign populist, egalitarian, etc. and these are dangerous tendencies.  The same dangerous tendency is at play when the anti-war movement welcomes Ron Paul as a champion.  Ron Paul opposes the Iraq war because of political isolationism (which when combined with his positions on trade and the constitutional limits of federal regulatory authority make him the most pro-corporate candidate running.  He believes in destroying every institution whereby the people can combat the rise of corporate power).  That is not something the anti-war community should get behind.  These are shortcuts that people take because they do not want to admit that we are years of hard work away from having a genuinely anti-war or working class movement in this country.  Praising morally repugnant people like Paul and Huckabee does nothing but cost us credibility.

  Posted by Poppolphil on Jan 11, 2008 at 10:08 PM

  The point is, ladies and gentleman, that class warfare—for lack of a better word—is good.

  Class warfare is right.

  Class warfare works.

  Class warfare clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

  Class warfare, in all of its forms…has marked the upward surge of mankind.

  Posted by mschlee on Jan 12, 2008 at 4:41 AM

  Huckabee’s a deluded fool.

  I think Sirota just wants an easily beatable candidate to get the nomination.

  Posted by Natalie on Jan 17, 2008 at 7:45 AM

  Orwellian aspects of our culture and its time, seemingly more apparent diurnally,  intrigue informed readers. They positively infuriate we socialists. Nonetheless, critical thinking and its appreciation of the satirical can be productive. However, Huckabee as Bob Follett of progressivism fame is quite a stretch, if not beyond the pale. Perhaps, I’d like to believe, the author’s intent, given his experience with the Lamont challenge in my state’s rally against Leibermanism,  is to prod the Democratic candidates with this implication that progressive thinking supportive of solialistic mindsets might somehow stem from so-called compassionate conservatism’s deferrence to biblical exhortations. For those of us inclined to socialism’s call to action and devoted to this publication as socialism’s periodical mainstay in the U.S., this report is more indicative of our nation’s repressed political discourse than cogent thought regarding capitalism’s continuing encrustation of political debate. It reminds me of The Mother Jones cover story not long ago that flattered Lou Dobbs for donning progressive bona fides. What could be more telling of the depths of our despair in the U.S., fellow socialists, than an ITT report suggesting an opportunistic resurrectionist like Huckabee taps his feet to the tune of The Internationale. Living in a subsidized public-housing tower in a small coastal Connecticut city, I observe the ravages of class warfare wherever I look, seeing, as usual, the lords of the manor trample the serfs as though the Bill of Rights is an advertising message and democracy a window-treatment for plutocracy.  Maybe this author needs an assignment. I’ve recently read an AP report informing me that the Pentagon is soon to open a 10,000 person refugee camp at Guatanamo. What refugees? Are the Dubya Emirates preparing for Fidel’s death and a consequent rush to US by thousands of would-be socialists who’d give up their convictions for better creature comforts? Could be. Such a scenario would provide theatrics the likes of which our CIA could only dream of in its continuing destabilization of our hemisphere’s stalwart stand for socialism. So it goes.

  Posted by Bud Wizer on Jan 17, 2008 at 5:43 PM

  “stalwart stand for socialism” ??

  More like a stalwart stand for permanent personal power and wealth by a selected few.

  Posted by Natalie on Jan 17, 2008 at 11:29 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 14 posts.

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