Huckabee could knock smile off Jeb Bush’s face

Jeb Bush is starting the new year with a smile. Former Arkansas governor and, until last weekend, Fox News host Mike Huckabee announced he would “explore” running for president.

By the way, these “exploration” announcements are yet another example of the government encouraging politicians to lie. Exploratory committees disguise the fact that a candidate is running about as well as glasses conceal Superman’s real identity. They require a willful suspension of disbelief on the part of everyone watching. Politicians like this loophole because it drags out the time in which they are allowed to conceal their donors and provides another round of headlines when they “formally” (and inevitably) announce their candidacies.

This is all to say Huckabee isn’t “exploring” the question of whether he’s running any more than Bush is. Bush wouldn’t resign from all those corporate boards and Huckabee wouldn’t walk off the Fox stage — or any stage — unless they’d already decided.

Huckabee’s announcement is good news for Bush for an obvious reason: The more crowded the right side of the Republican field, the clearer it will be on the left.

No, Bush isn’t a left-winger. He was a very conservative — and very successful — governor of Florida. But within the microcosm of the GOP primary electorate, he’s on the left, for want of a better term.

One such better term would be one we hear a lot these days: the establishment. On the right there’s a lot of debate about what it means to be “establishment” — but whatever the definition, Bush’s picture goes next to it in the dictionary.

Bush’s personality was always less populist than that of his brother George. Substantively, W’s compassionate conservatism had a lot more in common with their father’s political philosophy. Bush 41 announced in his inaugural that we have “more will than wallet.” Bush 43 noticed that we still had a lot of credit cards in that otherwise empty wallet. But stylistically, George W. Bush didn’t run as a “Bushy” but as a born-again Christian Texan.

Jeb Bush seems uninterested in, or incapable of, drawing on conservative identity politics. If anything he shows a thinly veiled disdain for anything that smacks of pandering to the base. He says a candidate must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general.” That’s a bit like saying, “You have to be willing to lose the playoffs to win the Super Bowl.”

Huckabee couldn’t be more different. He is a pandering prodigy, no doubt in part because it stems from sincere conviction. He got his start as a Baptist minister, staffer for a televangelist and as a hokey TV performer.

Huckabee’s greatest advantage is also his biggest disadvantage. His support is deep but narrow.

And that’s why Bush must be smiling.

Huckabee still has little chance of becoming president, but he has a good chance of deciding who the GOP nominee will be. If he decides to attack his competitors on the right, he could serve as a blocking tackle for Bush (and keep alive the prospects of a Vice President Huckabee).

If he takes dead aim at the establishmentarians, he’ll likely knock that smile off Bush’s face.