Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books reviews the latest work of some potential Republican candidates, including Mike Huckabee.

He doesn’t think much of Huckabee’s “book,” a word I qualify because it seems lofty for his standard assembly of mini-sermons larded with hyperbole and red meat for his base.

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[Ben] Carson seems to have loaned his rhetorical axe to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor whose deplorable book God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an extended pander to the resentful, conservative, evangelical, and probably southern American who doesn’t want liberals who think they’re better than he is telling him what to do. One would call it a dog whistle, except that we Yankee dogs can hear the whistle loud and clear, which is presumably as the author intends.Huckabee, who has spent the past few years hosting a weekly show on Fox before a live studio audience (he recently gave it up to prepare his candidacy), knows his constituency. The book is full of applause lines (“The IRS is a criminal enterprise”). Chapters carry titles like “Salt, Sugar, Soda, Smokes, and So Much More.” There are a few feints in the direction of talking about policy, but these quickly dissolve into rants. The chapter that purports to be about the economy is really just a long attack on the state of California, where Governor Jerry Brown is alleged to have throttled innovation and initiative with his regime of high taxes and heavy regulation. You’d hardly know from reading the book that California is America’s leading laboratory of innovation (Silicon Valley), and that despite serious post-recession economic woes, it has now bounced back.

As a matter of political strategy, Huckabee’s book is about the Iowa caucuses, where a disproportionate percentage of the electorate consists of evangelicals. If he doesn’t win or at least exceed expectations there, he’ll be out. He could hardly have made his hunger for their support any clearer.

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