ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Analysis now from our regular political observers: columnists David Brooks of The New York Times and EJ Dionne of the Washington Post and the Brookings Institution.
Hi, guys.
Mr. EJ DIONNE (Columnist, Washington Post; Senior Research Fellow, Brookings Institution): How are you?
Mr. DAVID BROOKS (Columnist, New York Times): Good to see you.
SIEGEL: And sticking with the Republicans for a few minutes, Mike Huckabee had this to say about his campaign today. It's not just a campaign anymore, he said, it's a cause.
Mr. MIKE HUCKABEE (Former Republican Governor, Massachusetts; Presidential Candidate): It's a cause to recognize that this nation is not a great nation because its government in Washington has some brilliant people making great decisions. It's a great nation because mothers and fathers out in places like South Carolina and Arkansas and the rest of the country raise decent kids and raise them up to be able to stand on their two feet. And what they really want is not a government that wants to provide everything for them but a government that will simply protect them so they can provide for themselves because we know that mothers and fathers raise better kids than governments do. And we kind of like to leave it that way.
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MICHELE NORRIS, host:
So, EJ and David, you heard Mike Huckabee there describing his campaign as a cause. But can you run a campaign on a cause? South Carolina is an expensive place to run a campaign. You have to bounce all over the state, run ads in several markets. Does Mike Huckabee have the money or the organization for that?
Mr. DIONNE: I think in South Carolina, he can run a campaign on it as a cause partly because evangelical Christians, his strongest group, are probably the largest part of that state's Republican primary electorate. Mike Huckabee got two pieces of good news out in New Hampshire. One, very modest, he ran third. He - it's better that he ran third - it wasn't a strong third, but he was there. But secondly, he did do well among white evangelical Christians again as he did in Iowa. There just happened not to be a whole lot of white evangelical Christians up here in New Hampshire. So, I think he may have the capacity to hang on in this race for a long time if he can keep consolidating this one important group in the Republican Party.
Mr. BROOKS: And I would say, if he can get it narrowed down to a one-on-one race - him versus McCain, him versus Romney, him versus Giuliani - he's got a very real chance because he does have the evangelicals. He's also in touch with economic anxiety in a way, I would say, the others are not. He talks about social anxiety, which is about divorce and single parenthood, intermingled with losing your job and losing your health care. And when real people experience that anxiety, it's the social and the economic all intermingled. Then the final thing he has - he is simply the most natural campaigner in the field.
So, he's got a lot of unlikely aspects to him. He doesn't believe in theory of evolution. That's not so great if you're going to run a national campaign. But he's also got a lot of skills. And I've talked to a bunch of Republican consultants, and they all say he'd have a real shot if it was one-on-one - him versus somebody else.
SIEGEL: How about the other candidates in South Carolina? We hear that Mitt Romney is pulling his ads in the state. EJ, have you heard that?
Mr. DIONNE: I have not. But I was struck by what happened yesterday with McCain in New Hampshire. The good - very good news is that he won in New Hampshire. But he won with votes from people who aren't going to loom in large numbers in South Carolina. He won moderates and liberals. There were some liberals who voted in the Republican primary. He won with people who disapproved - who had a negative view of George Bush. Interestingly, for the strongest supporter of the war, he won with voters who don't like the war in Iraq. And as he moves down to South Carolina, a lot of the groups who are - were still reasonably big in Republican primaries - appear - are not very big down there. And as for Mitt Romney, I mean, he does have a shot in Michigan. But listening to Scott Horsley's piece, I was struck that if Howard Dean in 2004 screened the names of states, Mitt Romney sounded like he was calmly listing new markets at a sales meeting.
And I think that David is absolutely right about Mike Huckabee. He does - he is the one candidate who talks believably about people's economic anxieties.
NORRIS: David, is it…
Mr. BROOKS: Well, you know, I…
NORRIS: Go ahead, David. Go ahead.
Mr. BROOKS: Well, I rode around with McCain a couple days ago. And we talked about economics, which he's pivoted to, as he goes to Michigan. And what's clear is he is - he actually feels in his gut what Huckabee has been talking about - the middle-class anxiety. And he said, you know, people are not afraid of globalization. But they want to know that government is non-neutral in the fight, that government is on their side. And he has broken with the pure-free market position a long time ago. And so, what he's offering people in Michigan is that the retraining program with the community colleges what you just heard about from Scott, but he's also offering some displaced worker insurance. If you work, you'll get your wages supplemented. That is not a pure-free market position.
But McCain had a very traumatic experience eight years ago where a guy came up to him and said, I have been working on this mill for 30 years. I just got laid off, I got no future. What are you going to do for me? And McCain wanted to enter this race with an answer to that question. So he has entered beyond the pure-free market - sort of Reagan coalition - into a new sort of Republican economics.
NORRIS: Gentlemen, I'd like to turn to the Democratic side. Quite a lot is being made of Hillary's, so we called it a moment in New Hampshire where she became very emotional during this talk with voters. Many are now saying that that tearful moment, or at least where her eyes started to well up with tears, was a defining moment. Do either of you buy that?
Mr. DIONNE: I think it was - I should say I had a nice breakfast of crow(ph) and eggs this morning. In more than 30 years of thinking about elections for a living, I've never been more certain and more wrong about a race. I thought that Barack Obama was going to win New Hampshire so take any (unintelligible) as I say with a grain of salt, but I do think that there were several moments that sort of presented Hillary Clinton, sort of ripped the veneer off a human being as her own supporters saw it. I thought there was the moment with the tears, there was the moment in the debate when the local TV, political reporter asked her, you know - said you're not likeable. And she said, well, that hurt my feelings. And I think Barack Obama hurt himself maybe more than we knew at the time when he said, Hillary, you're likeable enough, which came off as snarky to a lot of people. I think all those things helped.
But I also think, perhaps, we reporters judge speeches more as theater critics than as both in the way voters do. You know, voters care about health care and family and medical leave and job training. They're consumers, not theater critics. And I think a lot of us looked at the inspiration of Obama and it really is inspirational. It ought to be a lesson to Clinton because she needs a lot more of that. But these voters seem to respond to her very long and clear descriptions of what she was going to do for them.
SIEGEL: David Brooks, I just like to hear from you on the Democrats and you can retract that the - the phrase was juggernaut to the White House for Obama that…
Mr. BROOKS: I'm taking the dishonest approach. I'm simply going to deny that I said what I actually did say.
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Mr. BROOKS: I'm taking a vacation from the reality-based community in the spirit of the…
Mr. DIONNE: I think my position poll's better, David.
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Mr. BROOKS: But, you know, the Bush administration has taught me something. Now, I think what happened was a lot of different things. I think the tears were part of it, I think the debate performances - what, I think the organization cannot be underestimated. She actually got her vote out young people did not turn out. But then, what EJ said, I think is actually the most important. Obama catered to what you might call the Whole Foods, Starbucks set. Upscale, he did very well among college-educated, up-the-income ladder who want a more sensibility-drenched sort of politics.
Hillary Clinton did very well among the Wal-Mart people, who want good products at good prices. She did very well with high school-educated, very well with union households, very well with people making less than $50,000 a year and she offered them a longer list of deliverables, and those people stuck with her. And the fascinating thing to me is Democratic race is, year-after-year, are all the same. You got an upscale candidate versus a high school-educated candidate and inevitably, the high school-educated candidate, the candidate that wins those people ends up winning the nomination. This time, it's a little more complicated because for the first time, the upscale candidate, the Starbucks candidate - Obama is African-American, and he could get those people.
SIEGEL: Well, that's retail - no, it's political analyst David Brooks of the New York Times and EJ Dionne. Thanks to both of you once again.
Mr. BROOKS: Thank you.
Mr. DIONNE: Thank you.
NORRIS: Bye-bye.