Matt Yglesias

The Celebrity Party

Ross Douthat observes that Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee emerged from the 2008 election as the two conservative figures with some charisma and enthusiastic followers, but “both had the same Achilles’ heel: They seemed unready for high office, and owed their appeal more to personality than to substance.”

This meant that both faced the same post-election choice. Did they want to take their newfound eminence seriously? Or did they want to cash in on their celebrity?

For Palin, the serious path required at least serving out her term as governor before returning to the national stage. For Huckabee, it could have involved anything from starting a think tank to running for the Senate in 2010. For both, it would have meant wedding their political identity to ideas as well as attitudes.

I think this is all pretty much right. And as Douthat goes on to argue, there are a number of right-of-center policy wonks who’ve tried to articulate some kind of meaningful response to the nation’s problems, only to be ignored. But is he right that “there are substantial political rewards awaiting the politician who becomes the voice of an intellectually vigorous conservatism?” I’d like to think he is. But it also seems to me that going all the way back to the rise of George W. Bush in 1999 we’ve seen the conservative movement tending to fetishize stupidity and put forward the notion that there’s something actually un-American about being thoughtful, having respect for scholarship, or incorporating any kind of nuance into your discussion.

9/11 served to intensify this and for a while turned it into a mainstream attitude. The idea that the country was just kind of screwed to have a dim bulb in office amidst a national crisis was too much to handle, so instead The New York Times started running articles saying “many Democrats who once dismissed Mr. Bush as too naive and too dependent on advisers to steer the United States through an international crisis are now praising his and his advisers’ performance. Some are even privately expressing satisfaction that Mr. Gore, who tried to make his foreign affairs experience an issue in the campaign, did not win.” That moment has, fortunately, waned somewhat in the mainstream. But not, I think, in the conservative movement.

Early 2012 Polling

Gallup takes an early look at potential Republican contenders for 2012. Mike Huckabee, who doesn’t get the press coverage of a Sarah Palin, seems to be in the best shape:

As general election contenders, however, this crew all seems to be in bad shape:

Of course what looking at these polls doesn’t tell you is whether the answers to these questions this far out have any real predictive value. My guess would be that the answer is no, and that if Huckabee became the Republican nominee and the economy continues to be in bad shape that he’d win notwithstanding the tendency of a majority of Americans to say they wouldn’t even consider voting for him. That said, this definitely does underscore the basic fact that much as the conservative base may love Sarah Palin, the broader public hates her. Maybe—maybe—a Palin nomination would break the rule that the fundamentals matter most to presidential election outcomes.

Mike Huckabee, Cynicism, and EMP

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Mike Huckabee's got charisma, but he also continues to be dangerously ill-informed about vital policy issues, leaping head first into the deep sees of EMP madness:

The EMPACT conference represents a culmination of sorts for the EMP awareness movement. In his keynote speech, Mike Huckabee warned against complaisance. “We should not minimize the threat of EMP,” he said. “There’s always going to be cynics. There were cynics who didn’t believe the Japanese were a threat (to attack Pearl Harbor) and there were cynics who didn’t believe radical Islam was a threat.” Huckabee said he agreed with Fritz Ermarth, former chair of the National Intelligence Council, who the day before had told conference attendees that an EMP attack would most likely come from Iran, North Korea, or an Al Qaeda-type terrorist network. Huckabee also compared the EMP’s effects on the electric grid to that of a particularly bad ice storm.

Read Robert Farley’s article for a thorough takedown of the EMP hype. But note that Huckabee doesn’t even seem to really understand what cynicism is. I would also note that on the specific case of Peal Harbor, while it’s true that this illustrates that regimes sometimes do completely insane things that lead inevitably to their own destruction that betting on “they probably won’t do that, it’d be insane and lead inevitably to their own destruction” is going to leave you with a much higher batting average than would a Huckabee-style pose of constant hysteria.

The real kicker, however, is this:

Indeed, even the neoconservative Weekly Standard, which seems perpetually on the lookout for ways to plug purported existential threats to the homeland, stayed away from Niagara. One Standard editor said in an interview with the author, “I don’t go for that EMP stuff. Kind of more interested in dangerous scenarios that might actually happen.”

Mike Huckabee—too alarmist and paranoid for The Weekly Standard.

The Huckabee Plan

Sam Stein listens to Mike Huckabee’s radio commentary so you don’t have to and Ezra Klein pulls out this remark:

I want to see improvements in health care, too. But I think a better way to honor Ted Kennedy would be to ensure that every American has access to the latest private health care, as good as what senators receive.

What’s interesting is that though you sometimes hear conservatives toss this kind of line off, they never really bore deep down and try to formulate it into a plan. But you could really do this. Senators don’t get private health care from magical fairies, they’re enrolled in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program just like lots of other people. Indeed, the federal government is the largest employer in the United States. This is a form of government-provided health insurance that just happens to be provided exclusively to civilian workers in the federal government. But it could be provided to more people.

The way it works is that since the federal workforce is so giant, they’re able to attract a large number of different competing insurance plans. On top of that, the government heavily subsidizes premiums. You can download this PDF and see the rates charged to non-USPS workers (Postal Service workers are subsidized at a higher rate) for fee for service plans. You can get a “basic” plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield for $92.44 per month ($216.48 for a family). But that’s not buying you $92.44 per month of insurance, it’s buying you $369.72 per month of insurance—the federal government is picking up the rest of the tab. For the price of $3,327.84 per year per individual or $7,793.4 per family we could extend this offer to everyone in the country.

Alternatively, there’s the Blue Cross Blue Shield “standard” package. That costs $152.06 per month for an individual or $356.59 per family. In subsidies, the federal government shells out $4,047 a year for an individual and $9,166.56 for a family.

And as I say, we could really do this. You could write a law that says that all Americans will have the right to purchase insurance on these terms with this rate of government subsidy. But you’d obviously have to raise taxes to cover the cost. You’d have to raise taxes quite a bit. And you wouldn’t achieve anything in terms of “bending the curve” or getting long-term costs under control. That said, I’m not personally opposed to the idea of higher taxes and I sort of sympathize with the view that we should do access first and cost control later. So if Mike Huckabee or other conservative legislators is serious about the idea of giving all Americans access to the same health care options U.S. Senators enjoy then I would applaud their effort to write some serious legislation to that effect.

But frankly it’s extremely hard for me to imagine the GOP getting behind the kind of tax increases that would be involved. How much are we talking about? Well, currently health care spending accounts for 17.6 percent of US GDP. About 36 percent of that is accounted for by private health insurance. And in FEHB, federal subsidies for 72 percemt of the premiums. So 72 percent of 36 percent of 17.6 comes to the idea of new federal spending of about 4.56 percent of GDP per year. In other words, about $631 billion dollars in the first year, with costs rising after that (NB this is almost certainly an underestimate since universal FEHB would likely inspire many people to buy more generous subsidies coverage). As I say, abstracting away from political reality I’m not sure that’s such a terrible idea. Slap a 5 or 6 percent VAT on the country and give every American generous health insurance. But I’m pretty sure Mike Huckabee doesn’t actually favor that course of action. Or if he does, it deserves to be articulated in a much more worked-out way than some offhand comment. Which is an awful lot of words and pixels to have just wasted on point out that Huckabee is basically an empty suit who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but, damnit, congress has been out of session forever.

Huckabee Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Territories

Mike Huckabee is a fairly charming guy, but the fact that these kind of sentiments can be uttered by a member of the American political mainstream tells you a lot about why Arabs mistrust America’s approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict. He’s moved on from his general support for settlements to a call to, I guess, deport the entire population of Palestine to someplace else:

Speaking to a small group of foreign reporters in Jerusalem, Huckabee, seen as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, said the international community should consider establishing a Palestinian state some place else.

“The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That’s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic.”

In some ways, however, Huckabee is to be congratulated on his frankness. The implication of the policies of the Netanyahu administration, and of U.S.-based Jewish organizations that are pressing Barack Obama to back off America’s opposition to settlements, points exactly in the direction Huckabee is now espousing. Bibi and AIPAC aren’t about to start embracing a binational state, so they’re either talking about creating an apartheid system or else trying to make life sufficiently intolerable for the Palestinians that they all leave. American critics of criticizing Israeli policy don’t like to articulate such ideas because they’re appalling, but this is the road we’re heading down.