If Mike Huckabee ever follows Fred Thompson into an acting career, he would be ideal for the role of Buzz Windrip in a film version of Sinclair Lewis’ novel “It Can’t Happen Here.”
Like Huckabee, Windrip is a folksy and affable populist presidential candidate from a poor and socially conservative state:
Usually he was known as “Buzz.” He had worked his way through a Southern Baptist college, of approximately the same academic standing as a Jersey City business college, and through a Chicago law school, and settled down to practice in his native state and to enliven local politics. He was a tire- less traveler, a boisterous and humorous speaker, an inspired guesser at what political doctrines the people would like, a warm handshaker, and willing to lend money …
He had a luminous, ungrudging smile which (declared the Washington correspondents) he turned on and off deliberately, like an electric light, but which could make his ugliness more attractive than the simpers of any pretty man.
[H]e was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.
To find out what happens, read the novel. You’ll be dole- fully amused. The results aren’t exactly what the voters would have predicted.