Two columns illustrate the potential and the pitfalls inherent in the rhetoric of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee…

David Broder, fresh off being wowed by Fred Thompson’s willingness to tackle the issue of entitlements, sees Huckabee making some serious hay in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and beyond:

Huckabee is testing the same themes — but not in the strident, angry language that Buchanan used when he urged his followers to “ride to the sound of the guns.” Huckabee comes off as the friendly, down-home country preacher, a retired Baptist minister who can soothe and entertain the congregation, not just warn them of the fires of Hell.
But the message is designed to play to public discontent, especially when an overpriced housing market is once again being shaken in New Hampshire, as elsewhere, by a credit crunch.
“The economy looks good when you measure it in macro terms,” Huckabee said Thursday during a stopover in Washington, “but a lot of families are struggling just to reach the next step on the ladder.” Having grown up in a family where “you finished everything on your plate, because you never wasted a thing,” Huckabee said that he empathizes with the anxiety of “people who have no trust fund, no safety net to fall back on.”
He didn’t have to name Romney as the “trust fund” candidate in the race. The former venture capitalist’s wealth has been well publicized. All Huckabee has to say is “I’ve walked the aisles at Wal-Mart” to make his class consciousness evident.
Huckabee, like Buchanan in his time, is quick to jump on the easy foreign targets — the Chinese who are shipping unsafe toys and toothpaste to the United States, the illegal immigrants “who walk across the border without a scrap of identification and immediately go to work.”

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Brian Carney comes away from an interview with Huckabee alternately charmed and unnerved by Huckabee’s lack of specifics in some areas, his ability to maneuver almost any policy question back to his support for the Fair Tax,and his echoing of the Democrats in others. The governor begins by lamenting the tainted Chinese goods, and before long, he has called for U.S. the simultaneously pursue energy and food independence, and interviewer Carney wonders if that’s even possible in a world of globalization.

My rational head says that Huckabee’s populism, vague as it is, is a recipe for some bad policies. (Thankfully it isn’t the dystopian populism offered by John Kerry.) If trade barriers built prosperity, North Korea would be the world’s richest nation. Demonizing CEOs is a pretty cheap and empty applause line. Americans hate CEOs in the abstract, and the ones who run their company into the ground while collecting nine-figure payouts are deservedly despised. But Americans don’t resent the wealth of the Bill Gateses and Steve Jobses and folks like the Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. They applaud innovators, developers, creators, those who manage to bring more and better goods and services to the market.

But my gut tells me that when people are afraid of antifreeze in their toothpaste, or lead paint on their kids’ toys, they don’t want to hear somebody talk about the big-picture benefits of free trade. They want the poisoned stuff off their store shelves and want to find stuff made from a source they can trust. And there’s a part of me that can’t help but figure the tainted Chinese goods at least partially reflect that the Chinese grew used to not getting called out on anything; if they face a massive consumer boycott, they’re just reaping what they sowed. No reason for a Republican candidate to waste any effort trying to persuade Americans that Chinese goods aren’t that bad, because only a small portion are toxic.

So, the question is, will Huckabee’s populist rhetoric win over a larger number of lower and middle class voters than the number of free-marketeers who conclude he’s no better than John Edwards?