WHEN WE PAID pundits try to provide campaign analysis, we often strain to find historical analogies. Although I'm not asking for sympathy, please understand that it's not easy. There have been only fifty-something presidential campaigns, and obviously those conducted in the horse-and-buggy era provide scant parallels to an election held in our own age of Al Gore's wondrous intertubes. Besides, every one of these things is unique.

That said, I think I've found a near perfect parallel to the Huckabee '08 campaign--Pat Buchanan in 1996. Buchanan stunned the world in 1996 when he defeated Bob Dole in New Hampshire. That result caused the Republican electorate to ask itself two questions:

1) Is Pat Buchanan really up to being president?
2) If Bob Dole comes back and wins the presidency, do you think he might turn New Hampshire into a nuclear weapon testing zone?

A lot of Republicans wanted to believe that Buchanan might be the real deal. They/we thought the uninspired and uninspiring Dole would be obvious cannon fodder for the Clinton juggernaut. At least Buchanan could turn a phrase and had some charisma. But there were some constituencies that had natural concerns about a potential Buchanan presidency, namely gays, Jews, and people with triple-digit IQs.

Buchanan could have tried to assuage those concerns when the spotlight shone on him after his New Hampshire win. Instead, he amped up the crazy. He went to Arizona, donned a cowboy hat, and began firing a rifle with a devilish grin. His rhetoric became even more heated.

Mike Huckabee is this cycle's Pat Buchanan. A lot of Republicans wanted to believe that he was the answer to the flawed deck of frontrunners that the political gods have dealt us. I can't honestly say I was ever rooting for Huckabee, but a month ago I expected him to win the nomination. All he had to do was come across as a credible commander-in-chief for the five weeks leading up to Iowa and he would have pulled it off.

But Huckabee went the Buchanan route. Rather than assure the Republican electorate that he was more than a one trick pony who could speak beautifully on social issues and spiritual concerns, he doubled down on his pastor side. Perhaps with good cause. When he ventured opinions about serious policy matters outside his comfort zone, especially regarding global affairs, he showed an ignorance that was quite frankly stunning for someone who had the audacity to seek the presidency at a time of war.

And there's also Huckabee's past. Every politician has a past--issues he flip-flopped on or positions he took that his party dislikes. But Huckabee's past has caused Republicans to remember the Arkansas mores that drove us nuts during the Clinton years. Seemingly every day, another piece of, er, stuff, hits the fan. Over the weekend, it came out that Huckabee received $35,000 in honoraria in 2006 from a company that does stem cell research, the very same company that social conservatives blasted Mitt Romney over because his blind trust had invested in it. Huckabee's take of $35,000 from the stem cell researchers was but a small sliver of the roughly $378,000 in outside fees that Huckabee raked in during his final year as Arkansas' governor. Too bad he didn't have Hillary Clinton's facility with commodities trading--such a skill probably would have made things easier for Huckabee.