The “Huckabee panic” some political bloggers are calling it: The conservative backlash gathering against former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s increasingly formidable bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

What seemed like a second-tier candidacy three weeks ago now has earned the startled attention — and enmity — of commentators in the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and other journals of the conservative movement who seem to see in the former Arkansas governor an unknown quantity with suspiciously compassionate tendencies and little foreign policy experience.

The columnist Rich Lowry said in the latest issue of National Review that Mr. Huckabee’s nomination would “represent an act of suicide by his party.” Like Howard Dean in 2004, Mr. Lowry wrote, Mr. Huckabee is “an under-vetted former governor who is manifestly unprepared to be president of the United States.”

Stephen Hayes, writing in the Weekly Standard, said Mr. Huckabee’s understanding of foreign policy was rudimentary at best, and often “sounded more like Dennis Kucinich than Dick Cheney.”



On the campaign trail in Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Huckabee has spoken little about his foreign policy priorities except to tell audiences that “Islamo-facism is the greatest threat” facing them, and that as president he would make the United States military “the greatest in the world.”

To some extent, newcomers to the Huckabee panic take their lead from the uber-conservative PAC known as the Club for Growth, which sees Mr. Huckabee as a tax-raising, regulation-imposing, anti-business populist governor who spent too much of his tenure dealing with the problems of poor people (a large constituency in Arkansas, it should be said.) The club has been buying ads in Iowa showing the former governor (in his 300-pound form, before he lost 110 pounds and became a marathon runner), signing legislation as governor to raise taxes on cigarettes and impose a surcharge on state income taxes.

Still, people who have followed Mr. Huckabee’s transformation from governor to presidential candidate don’t see what the fuss is about — at least as far as his economic positions are concerned.

His Fair Tax plan would abolish the I.R.S and replace personal and corporate income taxes with a national sales tax. His ideas about Social Security, Medicare and health insurance are straight from George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign playbook. He favors giving people the option to take their Social Security as a lump sum payment on retiring. He opposes any kind of guaranteed health coverage, in favor of a system of tax breaks to encourage people to buy their own.

He sometimes alleges that “Wall Street types are afraid to death of a guy like me,” but to date he has given them no reason to feel any such thing.

Janine Parry, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas who has studied Mr. Huckabee’s record and his campaign, said that “Nothing in his platform is very much of a threat to economic conservatives, certainly not his tax plan.”

If anything, she said, she has marveled at how smoothly right-ward his campaign has tacked. “In his heart of hearts I think he is just slightly right of center. He doesn’t want to soak the rich, but he’s from a state with a lot of poor people, so he doesn’t want to soak them either. He’s pragmatic. I would be surprised in fact if some of what he is saying now he doesn’t abandon after the primary season as a little more regressive than he really is.”

Which, if true, may be just what the panic is all about.