Mike Huckabee and the death of the populist president

Andrew Jackson, the ur-populist, may have killed the National Bank by force of will, but most populists these days would need people to explain how to navigate the millions-strong behemoth that is the federal government. Every administration has friends and enemies within the bureaucracy already. How would you even begin to sort them out without hired expertise?

So long as the modern presidential campaign remains what it is, we will never have a truly populist or patrician president again. George Washington essentially took office by acclamation. But no one would dare run a front-porch campaign now. No matter how popular, the man who tried it would seem unsporting.

The expectation that a presidential aspirant will mount a hugely staffed, professionally executed campaign is a subtle way of forbidding a major shakeup in Washington. The public wants to see a candidate surrounded by hacks and flacks; without that phalanx we suspect a candidate would be quickly overmatched and outwitted. There is no way to beat the system, so Ed Rollins is absolutely correct that Huckabee, like Barack Obama before him, must come to terms with it and join it.