Authenticity: compare and contrast

Great Huckabee quote, via The Stump, regarding his controversial "Merry Christmas" ad:

"If I had used the name of Jesus Christ in vain, and blurted it out as profanity, no one would be talking about it," he says. "Nobody. It would simply get ignored and accepted as the way we talk these days. But because I invoked his name on his own birthday, to say to America, 'Happy birthday, merry Christmas,' somehow everybody sees in it something that isn't even there. Have we so lost our national soul? Have we become so coarse that even the attempt to bring some civility to the political arena is met with nothing more than scorn, disdain, and disbelief?"

Noam adds: "This brought as many head-nods and murmurs of approval as I've seen on the campaign trail this year."

Consider that in light of this passage from today's NYTimes dispatch from Iowa:

But he does not light up a room the way some charismatic politicians, like a Barack Obama, might. He warms it up.

“I would say he’s more personable and congenial than anything else,” said Howard Taylor, 52, a community college instructor in West Des Moines. “He’s the candidate who believes certain things the way I do, and for the same reasons I do. He doesn’t have to be electrifying.”

Somehow, the very lack of magnetism and fieriness has become one of the hallmarks of Mr. Huckabee’s campaign persona. He is the social conservative who is “not mad at anybody,” the Christian who does not rail against “happy holiday” cards issuing from the White House, but just puts on a red sweater and makes a campaign advertisement with “Silent Night” playing in the background.

“I believe he’s not looking at polls, like some of these other politicians do, Hillary Clinton especially,” said Doug Butler, 48, a Marshalltown executive. “If he wants to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ well he’s going to say it. This controversy is ridiculous.”

Notice that last quote? What the voter is responding to is not Huckabee's religiosity. He's responding to his authenticity. Or at least the appearance of it.

Contrast that to Mitt Romney, who, like it or not, is the very model of inauthenticity. This is why his flip-flops on abortion and homosexuality stick to him, reinforcing conservative voters' reservations about him, while Huck's flip-flops on, say, immigration, do not.

Speaking of inauthentic, here's the Mittster going all Clintonian on us, saying that when he claimed he saw his father marching with Martin Luther King -- which never happened -- he meant "saw" in a "figurative sense." Heh heh heh.