And 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.
So far, they’ve chosen celebrity instead. Huckabee spent the last year hamming it up on a weekly talk show, and the last month hawking a book of Christmas stories. As for Palin — well, you probably know what she’s been up to lately.
Nobody should begrudge them their choices. Think tanks are a snooze; Senate races are a grind. Signing autographs for your adoring fans is more fun than rounding up budget votes in Juneau.
But they were the wrong moves if either wanted to become president someday. Huckabee’s gabfest is a weekly reaffirmation of the rap that he’s too lightweight for the Oval Office. Palin has sealed her identity as a culture-war lightning rod: she can inspire hysteria from liberals and adulation from conservatives), but she’s unlikely to persuade anyone in the middle to trust her with the reins of government.
It’s possible to be a celebrity and a serious politician at the same time: Barack Obama’s career proves as much. But Obama’s celebrity status is frequently a political liability, and he’s (usually) wise enough to know it. That’s why he plays the wonk as often as he plays the icon.
For now, no Republican leader projects a similar level of seriousness. Late in the Bush years, it was easy to dismiss conservatism as brain-dead. Among policy thinkers, that isn’t true anymore: the advent of Obama seems to have provided just the jolt that right-of-center wonks needed. But innovative proposals are useless without politicians willing to champion them.
When the Republican minority needed an alternative to the Obama administration’s sweeping stimulus proposal, for instance, a number of free-market economists were ready with an answer: a payroll tax cut. It was plausible, elegant and easy to explain, but there was no Republican leader with the wit to seize it and sell it.
You could say the same about regulatory reform. A slew of conservative economists and think-tankers have been working on ways to protect free markets from a re-run of last fall’s “too big to fail” fiasco. But most Republican politicians would rather rail against bailouts that have happened than talk about how to prevent them from happening again.
In the health care debate, too, conservative and libertarian policy thinkers have floated a number of plans to expand insurance coverage. Some are incremental and some are sweeping; some build on the existing system and some would essentially replace it. But any of them would be better than the plan House Republicans actually put forward, which would hardly expand coverage at all.
True, these ideas won’t sell millions of books, or excite the crowd on Huckabee’s talk show. But they’re what the Republican Party needs if it’s going to be more than just a brake on liberalism’s ambitions. And they’re what voters are going to be looking for, in 2012 and beyond, as proof that conservatives can be trusted once again.
This means that there are substantial political rewards awaiting the politician who becomes the voice of an intellectually vigorous conservatism. It probably won’t be Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin. If Republicans are lucky, though, it will be somebody who shares their charisma — but who prefers the responsibilities of leadership to the pleasures of celebrity.
Ross Douthat writes for The New York Times.
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