John Fund reviews the Mike Huckabee book

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who won the Iowa presidential caucuses and became a mini-media sensation earlier this year, has a popular new book out (it's ranked No. 5 on next week's New York Times bestseller list) laying out his philosophy and settling some scores from the campaign.

As for philosophy, Mr. Huckabee was clearly stung by attacks on him as being insufficiently conservative during his ten years running the Arkansas state government from 1996 to 2006. He declares he was the genuine conservative in this year's presidential race and warns about coming economic hard times. He bitterly recalls "getting laughed at by the Wall Street Journal and pilloried by the National Review. They were just dicin' and slicin' me for not following the company line."

Mr. Huckabee thinks the "company line" is a combination of rigid fiscal conservatism and a refusal to use government to help people in times of distress. His book includes a chapter called "Faux-Cons: Worse than Liberalism" In it, he says the "real threat" to the Republican Party is a hidden "libertarianism masked as conservatism....[I]t threatens to not only split the Republican Party, but render it as irrelevant as the Whig Party."

Of course, Mr. Huckabee ignores exit polls from both the 2006 and 2008 elections that show many Republicans stayed home because the party had strayed from its fiscally conservative roots.

He also neglects to mention that the great hero of Republicans, Ronald Reagan, explicitly called for all wings of the Republican Party to stay united and raise "a banner of bold colors, rather than pale pastels." In a famous interview with Reason magazine, the Gipper noted: "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism....The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. . . . I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path."

Mr. Huckabee takes other shots in his book, including one that dismisses a Mitt Romney proposal to encourage more investment in the stock market as a Marie Antoinette approach to the economy: "Let them eat stocks!"

In interviews promoting his book, Mr. Huckabee also admits to some puzzlement about the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running-mate, a job he thought himself in line for. "She's wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair," he told the New Yorker magazine. "It wasn't so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K....She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn't prepared."

Perhaps one reason why Mr. Huckabee's critics weren't enthusiastic about him joining the GOP ticket was his attitude. Rather than attack free-market groups like the Club for Growth as "the Club for Greed," Mrs. Palin assembled a broad coalition to win the Alaska governor's race in 2008 and maintained warm relations with both free-marketers and social conservatives. That's a page from the Reagan playbook that Mr. Huckabee seems not to have mastered, and indeed seems intent on ripping up.