Huck: God is Push Polling for Me

For a brief moment earlier this week, I thought Mike Huckabee might be an attractive candidate. Mitt Romney is clearly the best managerial president in the Republican field, but he struggles with authenticity and TV persona. But I reversed on Huck when I realized that authenticity is less charming when you are merely authentically goofy.



In my presidency class we noted that Jimmy Carter and George Bush II share an annoying characteristic -- a moralistic certainty that leads them to routinely "damn the torpedoes." It's charming on one level but gets tiresome: eventually, you want the guy to converse with people instead of dictating his view of the Divine.

What do Bush and Carter have in common? It's a brand of Christianity that draws heavily on notions of divine election and at its core contains a literal view of predestination. This is relatively harmless when taken in a kind of hazy way like Clinton, for example. But when you buy into divine election and predestination literally, and end up in the White House, it's hard not to see anything you do as Divine will.

When Huckabee says there is only one explanation for his rise in the polls, he means that literally. When you literally believe in predestination, there is only one explanation for everything: God's will.

Looks to me like Huck's got that bug. And if you think Romney has a religion problem, you ain't seen nuthin yet. There is nothing in Mitt's brand of religion that even comes close to this.