Posted on 05/08/2015 8:40:18 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
Sometimes, probably because he’s such an affable media presence, I forget why I dislike the political version of Mike Huckabee so much.
Maybe it’s the aw-shucks populism, which isn’t substantively very different from the class-conflict rhetoric we hear from so many on the left these days. Or maybe it’s that Everyman Huckabee has been running for one political office or another for the past 25 years — a fact that might escape the attention of anyone listening to the nuggets of blue-collar wisdom found in his speeches and those God-guns-grits-and-gravy books he writes.
Since his previous run for the presidency, Huckabee has hosted a national radio show and a television show, and he has endorsed all sorts of interesting products, including “secret biblical cures for cancer,” to, no doubt, some unfortunate and desperate people — because Huckabee, like all those selfish plutocrats he likes to denounce, is out to make a buck.
Or maybe it’s his paternalistic attacks on pop culture — the ones that make him sound like some reincarnated member of the Parents’ Music Resource Center — that are so off-putting. After all, as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee was a zealous advocate of the nanny state — passing precedent-setting intrusions into the lifestyle choices of individuals in Arkansas.
It could also be his role as John McCain’s hitman in the 2008 primaries, when he attacked Mitt Romney’s faith in an effort to dissuade evangelicals from supporting the Mormon candidate. Focusing on a candidate’s belief system, at least from my perspective, is within the bounds of acceptable political debating. But Huckabee’s churlish innuendo dropping should have undercut any perception you might have that the cheery former Baptist preacher is anything but your typical politician.
Mostly, though, it’s his philosophical outlook.
There are a number of policy fights on the center-right side of American politics, but there’s also a measure of ideological unanimity (even if it is often only theoretical) about the role of government — namely that it should, to some extent, be smaller and less intrusive. There is no conceivable way for Huckabee to make that argument or represent that consensus.
Huckabee is what liberals in the media imagine a strong Republican candidate might look like. I mean, what segment of the GOP will Huckabee represent? The social-conservative vote is well covered this time around. So, will it be the tax-hike faction? The anti-trade faction? The “we need more laws” faction? The anti-school-choice faction, which believes that teachers’ unions are doing a great job and that No Child Left Behind was the greatest education-reform effort by the federal government in our lifetime?
Yet even as Huckabee announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential nomination, and evidence began to emerge on social media that he is going to have a tough time gaining traction with any conservative group, he was getting plenty of accolades from the press. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza found Huckabee’s vacuous presidential announcement solid. He wrote about it, in a piece titled “Why the Republican Party really needs Mike Huckabee right now.”
So, why? “Because even though Huckabee remains outside of the top tier of candidates, he is, by far, the Republicans’ best messenger to the middle and lower-middle classes — economic brackets that the party has struggled to win in recent elections.”
Even if we concede that Cillizza’s contention is true — and there is little evidence that it is, seeing as it’s arguable that Democrats are struggling with middle-class voters just as much — his piece and many like it make the enormous assumption that the GOP can appeal to these brackets only by using the language of the Left.
And if you believe that, then, yes, Huckabee is your man. Take as an example this statement regarding entitlements: “There are some who propose that to save the safety nets, like Medicare and Social Security, we ought to chop off the payments for the people who had faithfully had their paychecks and pockets picked for the politicians promising them that their money would be waiting for them when they were old and sick.”
A Huckabee presidency, it seems, would feature the “there are some who propose . . .” straw man that you’re no doubt familiar with after listening to our current president’s fine speeches. But who exactly is proposing that we chop off payments to people who have faithfully paid into the system for years? There is no mainstream conservative in this country who advocates Washington’s eliminating benefits already promised to citizens. This is the same dishonest argument you hear whenever there’s talk of entitlement reform. Almost every plan offers an element of choice — allowing people to voluntarily enter into a new deal with government — or it changes the parameters of entitlements for future generations.
Now, I confess that if Huckabee were serious about being president, rather than simply running a vanity campaign, this sort of thing would matter far more. But the media will almost certainly use Huckabee as an example of how conservatives should be talking about poverty, inequality, and entitlements, because his rhetoric will often be indistinguishable from what we hear on the left. But America already has a party tasked with making that case. Do we really need two?
Huck No!
>> Huck No!
A-Men!
ROTFL
What's right with him? That will be a shorter list.
The “aw, shucks”, good-old-boy affable public persona of Mike Huckabee effectively covers a much deeper agenda, one that would try to do things like “fix” Obamacare, not fundamentally repealing and replacing it, an accommodating foreign policy in regards to America’s trade agreements that does not necessarily protect either American capital or American labor, and compassion for the “poor undocumented folks” that looks suspiciously like an almost total amnesty.
In other words, not to reverse or even slow the slide into a total mediocrity for that territory once known as “the United States of America”.
Hell, we got Jeb Bush to do that for us.
He is an idiot.
Maurice Clemmons
....”What’s right with him? That will be a shorter list”....
The guy simply doesn’t fit the bill. He’s probably an ok individual but not someone I’d want to know. Just don’t like the guy....he’s too folksy for me and too soft on most issues...he’s just hard to listen to.
There’s a few people I switch channels on....he’s one of them. Just nerving to listen to.
....”What’s right with him? That will be a shorter list”....
The guy simply doesn’t fit the bill. He’s probably an ok individual but not someone I’d want to know. Just don’t like the guy....he’s too folksy for me and too soft on most issues...he’s just hard to listen to.
There’s a few people I switch channels on....he’s one of them. Just nerving to listen to.
no more dopes from Hope.
Because the left knows Huck will be beaten like a piñata.
1. Soft-on-crime Governor who went on a pardon/commutation spree
2. Pro-instate-tuition for illegal aliens and other giveaways – poor record on immigration
3. Fiscal liberal Tax-and-spender as Governor
4. Dissembled about his record when challenged (pardons, taxes, ethics)
5. Not a conservative, hurt conservatives in Arkansas
6. Ethics issues, taking public money for private use
7. Flipflopper, on immigration, Cuba and other issues
8. An incompetent Jimmy Carteresque boob on foreign policy
9. Is a nanny-stater supporter of smoking bans and enviro-wacko CO2 caps
10. Fired the prosecutor who filed animal cruelty charges against his son David
Huckabee's Plethora of Pardons
Huckabee: Anybody with an IQ above Broccoli, knows I am a conservative
A plea from (an) Arkansas Christian conservative
He’s not a real conservative and I see him as a slimy game player.
He has one thing going for him; when Linda Gramnasty enters the race Huck will no longer be the worst candidate.
Of course in my opinion they all trail far behind CRUZ and I have no second favorite; it is “CRUZ or LOSE”!
Once I saw he was for common core, that told me all I needed to know. Wrongheadedness like that is systemic. Any friend of commie core is not a friend of mine.
I would like to like Huckabee, but he sets off my phony-meter.
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