That must be it. After all, when have prominent Republicans ever idolized someone who went to a small, lesser-known college? (Noted Beltway cocktail-party RINO Karl Rove also managed to do okay for himself without an Ivy diploma.) Skip ahead to 4:00 for Huck’s harangue about that or listen to the whole clip to hear him and Laura Ingraham chat about the DREAM Act. The best part? Ingraham, a Dartmouth grad and Connecticut native, slyly egging him on to vent about the chip on his shoulder by telling him “you lived in America,” unlike us cloistered metropolitan types. She knew it would set him off and darned if it didn’t. Great radio, just as her Palin interview was.

I posted the link to this earlier on Twitter and someone immediately piped up that Huckabee was stealing Palin’s act here. Alas, no: As noted in last week’s “blue bloods” post, it was Huck who was grousing about snooty Republican elitists before grousing about snooty Republican elitists was cool. That was a hard sell in 2007, before the financial crisis and TARP lit the populist fuse, and he wasn’t as well positioned as Palin now is to sell it because the media — avatars of “elitism” — have always been hostile to her but relatively cordial to him. She can use them as a foil in a way that he can’t, which leaves his complaints about the “establishment” sounding tinny by comparison. See Ace’s post this morning about “anti-elitist panic” for a critique of that. He says he’s already tired of it, but there’s going to be a lot, lot more of it before a GOP nominee is chosen. And not just from Palin, as this clip demonstrates.

Exit question: Should we read anything into the fact that Huckabee’s former campaign manager is now posting screeds like this at CNN?