“The Devil In Mike Huckabee”: Mr. Huckabee Far Overshadows His Kinder Gentler Gov. Huckabee
So Mike Huckabee is ending his weekly Saturday night show on Fox News as he thinks about a run for president in 2016. Tragically, his Fox News audience will be stuck having to find other shows to enjoy, like reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger or the torture scenes from Zero Dark Thirty.
While Huckabee is thinking about his run for president, I thought it was time to think about Huckabee. And I’m talking both of them. What do I mean? Well, there’s “Governor Huckabee,” a genial, compassionate person. And then there’s “Mr. Huckabee,” his callous, rightwing alter ego.
First, however, I want to address those who are simply dismissing Huckabee as having zero chance of securing the GOP nomination in 2016. They are wrong.
Sure, recent polls have Jeb Bush leading the GOP field. But Bush is as exciting to many conservatives as Hillary Clinton is to many progressives, meaning not so much. They are both viewed in essence like eating Brussels sprouts. Sure, you knew it’s good for you, but it’s not exciting.
But Huckabee (akin to Elizabeth Warren on the left) is like an ice cream sundae. They excite people, and primaries tend to be dominated by voters who are the most excited.
And keep in mind that when Huckabee ran for president in 2008, he won the Iowa caucuses. He also did well in other early primaries such as in Missouri, which he lost by 1 percent to the Brussels sprout of that field, John McCain.
Plus the GOP electorate has become more conservative since 2008. In 2012, 50 percent of those who voted in the first batch of GOP presidential contests were Evangelical Christians, up from 44 percent in 2008.This bodes well for Huckabee in early primary states like Missouri, Colorado, and Minnesota, where the like-minded Rick Santorum won in 2012.
Bottom line: Huckabee is for real. At least from an electoral point of view. But who is the real Huckabee is another question.
There’s the kindly Governor Huckabee who championed an increase in the minimum wage, hired more state employees and even expanded government services with programs such as “ARKids First” that provided health coverage for thousands of Arkansas’ children.
Now let’s meet “Mr. Huckabee,” whose views on a range of issues are truly frightening – I’m talking hide the children and grab a pitchfork scary. Here’s a sample:
1. Huckabee wants Christian sharia law: Huckabee stated during his 2007 presidential campaign that we can’t change the Bible to line up with society’s “contemporary view,” instead we “should amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards.” Do you think he really wants to stone to death woman who aren’t a virgin on their wedding night like it mandates in the Bible?
2. Gays are a health hazard: Huckabee stated that “homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.”
3. The Sandy Hook shooting is our fault: Huckabee blamed the horrific killing of 26 people, including 20 children, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012 not on gun violence or even the act of a crazed gunman. Instead he said it was because “we’ve systematically removed God from our schools” and as a result we should not be “surprised that schools have become a place for carnage.”
4. AIDS insanity: When running for the US Senate in 1992, Huckabee called for a quarantine of people who had AIDS. He also decried increased government funding for AIDS research, instead suggesting that money should come from “multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor [and] Madonna,” who should be encouraged to “give out of their own personal treasuries.” In 2007, Huckabee said he stood by these earlier remarks, but would phrase them differently.
5. Michael Brown had it coming: In December, Huckabee told us that Michael Brown would be alive if he acted “like something other than a thug.” He added that he was “disgusted” by politicians and athletes who flashed the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture.
6. Gay marriage makes Jesus cry: In 2013, Huckabee called gay marriage an “unholy pretzel” that has turned “holy matrimony” into a “perversion.” Huckabee also tweeted that “Jesus wept” over the 2013 US Supreme Court decision striking down DOMA. And Huckabee even said in September that he doesn’t care if he is on “the wrong side of history,” as long as he is “on the right side of the Bible” when it comes to gay marriage.
7. Sorry if you are already sick: Not only does Huckabee oppose Obamacare, he opposed the one provision that most people like, namely that health insurers shouldn’t be able to deny coverage to those with preexisting medical conditions.
8. Ignore court decisions/laws that God wouldn’t like: This past September, while speaking of abortion laws and gay marriage court decisions, Huckabee declared that we should not accept “ungodly” judicial rulings that “will cause us to have to stand before God with bloody hands.”
Sure, there are other Huckabee comments I could highlight, like his famous one from last January about women’s libidos, or how Martin Luther King, Jr. would be standing with him in fighting against marriage equality, but I think you get it by now. Mr. Huckabee far overshadows his kinder, gentler Gov. Huckabee.
Now while many of you might be shaking your head in disbelief over Huckabee’s views, keep in mind that it’s likely that nearly 50 percent of the GOP primary voters in 2016 will agree with most, if not all of them. And that’s far scarier than anything Huckabee has said.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, January 7, 2015
“Populism Is As Much A Problem As Plutocracy”: Mike Huckabee Is Not The Cure For What Ails The GOP
It’s become conventional wisdom among a certain segment of political pundits and conservative intellectuals — especially the so-called Reformicons — that the GOP has a plutocracy problem. Too many high-end tax cuts, too much indifference to the struggles of working-class voters, too many denunciations of the mooching ways of the American people — all of it adds up to a party that looks out of touch and overly beholden to the concerns of wealthy donors at the expense of everyone else.
The solution, supposedly, is populism — Republican candidates who can speak the language and understand the problems of ordinary voters.
Until recently, no one fixing to run for the White House in 2016 looked likely to do so as a populist. But that may have changed over this past weekend, when Mike Huckabee quit his television show on Fox News as a possible first step toward throwing his hat into the ring.
You’d think that the prospect of a Huckabee candidacy would cause the party’s populists to swoon. After all, Huckabee is a folksy Southern evangelical Christian, a bass-playing two-term governor, and an ordained Southern Baptist minister who won eight states (including Iowa) the last time he ran for president in 2008. And that was before he raised his profile with a nationally syndicated radio program and a TV show on the right’s premier cable channel.
And yet the Huckabee news this past Saturday produced the opposite of excitement. Mainstream conservatives mocked the prospect of his candidacy on Twitter, while reformers who’ve been pining for a populist have been muted.
The question is why.
And the answer, I think, is that on some level smart Republicans understand that populism is as much a problem for the party as plutocracy.
Yes, Mitt Romney’s tendency to toady to superrich donors and entrepreneurs — coming on the heels of George W. Bush’s high-end tax cuts — certainly saddled the GOP with a plutocratic image problem. But what about its tendency to flatter culturally alienated middle-class Americans by dismissing evolutionary biology, by mocking professors and “experts” of all kinds, and by pandering to the prejudices of a certain kind of ill-informed, reactionary religious believer?
The fact is that the Republican Party has long since become a bizarre only-in-America hybrid of fat cats and rednecks.
Deep down Republicans know that while a Huckabee candidacy might help address the image problems associated with the first half of that equation, he’d make those wrapped up with the second half far worse.
Consider some of Huckabee’s public statements in recent years:
Praising the work of a hack historian lionized by Know Nothing evangelicals, Huckabee declared in 2011, “I almost wish that…all Americans would be forced, at gunpoint, to listen to every David Barton message.” (Thank goodness for that “almost”!)
Responding to the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012, Huckabee suggested that schools had become “place[s] of carnage” because “we have systematically removed God from our schools.”
Last winter, Huckabee stated in a speech (not unscripted remarks) that “if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”
Huckabee’s latest book, slated to appear on Jan. 20, is titled God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.
That, my friends, is what right-wing American populism sounds like in the second decade of the 21st century. It is the irritable mental gesture of a provincial (rural or exurban) white America that can’t tell the difference between cultural signaling and a cogent argument. And it treats the details of public policy as an afterthought or a matter of indifference.
Would-be Republican reformers can look for a better vehicle than Mike Huckabee for the populism they favor, but they’re unlikely to find one. Huckabee — or someone like him — is the only game in town.
The authentic reform of the GOP — its refashioning into a genuinely national party — requires more than the shedding of its plutocratic image. It also requires that the party’s leading lights give up on their impossible populist dreams.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 6, 2014
“Falling Off A Right-Wing Cliff”: Mike Huckabee Threatens GOP Over Marriage
The right wasn’t pleased when the Supreme Court indirectly cleared the way for marriage equality in several states this week, but some conservatives took the news worse than others. For example, take Fox News’ Mike Huckabee, a former preacher, governor, and presidential candidate.
Huckabee declared this week that any Supreme Court decision is just an “opinion” until Congress passes “enabling legislation” signed by the president. High court rulings, he added, are “not the ‘law of the land’ as is often heralded.”
None of this is even remotely accurate, but the comments were the latest evidence of Huckabee falling off a right-wing cliff. The Republican also said this week that Americans should doubt U.S. officials giving the public information about Ebola because of Benghazi.
And in case that weren’t quite enough, Huckabee also this week threatened to leave the Republican Party for being insufficiently anti-gay.
One guest on the program was Mike Huckabee, who began his interview by threatening to leave the Republican Party if the GOP does not take a stand against the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday not to hear appeals of lower court rulings striking down gay marriage bans in several states.
Incensed by the decision, Huckabee declared that “I am utterly exasperated with Republicans and the so-called leadership of the Republicans who have abdicated on this issue,” warning that by doing so the GOP will “guarantee they’re going to lose every election in the future.”
The former governor added that the GOP might lose “guys like me and a whole bunch of still God-fearing, Bible-believing people” unless they become more aggressive in fighting a right-wing culture war against marriage equality and reproductive rights.
Huckabee went on to say he’s prepared to “become an independent,” adding, “I’m gone…. I’m tired of this.”
At a certain level, this isn’t entirely new. Over the course of the last 20 years, I’ve lost count of how many times prominent social conservatives and leaders of the religious right movement have threatened to leave the Republican Party en masse for not going far enough in fighting the culture war. There’s never been any follow-through, at least not to any meaningful degree.
That said, Ed Kilgore raised a good point: “[I]t’s not unusual for pols associated with the Christian Right to suggest their foot soldiers are going to get discouraged at being played for suckers by the Republican Establishment, and might stay home or stray. But Huck’s making a personal statement about his own threat to book if the GOP doesn’t conspicuously get back on the traditional marriage train. And he’s saying it via the homophobic obsessives of the AFA, who can be sure to broadcast it near and far.”
Republican officials usually ignore such threats, confident that when push comes to shove, right-wing culture warriors will stay with the GOP to prevent Democratic victories.
Still, Huckabee’s ultimatum reinforces a Republican Party with an awkward dilemma. If the GOP quietly moves towards the mainstream on social issues, it alienates a significant part of the party’s base. If Republicans toe the far-right line on the culture war, the GOP will continue to shrink, pushing away younger voters and a mainstream that’s increasingly respectful of diversity.
To be sure, this has long been a challenge for Republicans, but with the party’s demographic challenges becoming more acute, and far-right voices like Huckabee’s growing louder, GOP leaders are left with no good options. Is it any wonder Republicans responded to news from the Supreme Court this week with near-total silence?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 10, 2014
“Mean Mike”: How Can “The Base” Fully Get On The Bandwagon Of Anyone Smiled Upon By The Godless Liberal Media?
An examination of the rather different tone associating Mike Huckabee’s proto-candidacy for 2016 was inevitable, and it’s been served up usefully by David Freedlander at The Daily Beast. In 2008, he observes, Huck had quite the reputation for being sunny:
Frank Rich, in The New York Times, wrote that Huckabee was the Republican Obama. Rich attributed Huckabee’s rise in the polls to “his message,” which “is simply more uplifting—and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian—than that of rivals, whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o’clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia.”
It was an idea that ricocheted around liberal blogs and talk radio outlets. Sure, Huckabee’s views on social issues were a bit out of right field, but they weren’t appreciably different from those of the rest of the GOP field. And the rest of his policy ideas, even when right-leaning, were bathed in a soft, summer camp biblical glow. People of faith, he said in one memorable speech, need to show that they “are not just angry folks mad about some things we don’t like, but people who have joy in our hearts. People who want to help those without housing to find it, those without drinking water to drink it, to help people who are hungry at night to know what it is to have food.”
Contrast that with today’s Angry Huck:
This new Huckabee told the New Hampshire Freedom Summit, “I’m beginning to think that there’s more freedom in North Korea than there is in the United States.” It’s the Huckabee who said Democrats want the women of America to “believe that they are helpless with Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.” Gone is the talk of evangelicals approaching the political sphere “with joy in our hearts.” Instead, Huckabee now wonders, “Why is it that Christians stand back and take it in the teeth time and time and time again?” It is this Huckabee who defended the Duck Dynasty reality star’s comments on gay marriage and civil rights in the South but accused those who criticize Chick-fil-A’s corporate anti-gay marriage stance of engaging in “vicious hate speech.”
Freedlander bats around several possible explanations for this new, more saturnine Huckabee, from the most obvious (the mood of “the base”) to the more personal (Huck’s furious at himself that he didn’t run for president in 2012). My favorite is the claim from an old rival in Arkansas who says it’s the Happy Huck that was a pose:
“He might have been a Baptist preacher, but he had a mean streak a mile wide,” said Jimmy Jeffress, a former Arkansas lawmaker who served in the statehouse during Huckabee’s tenure.
I’m guessing Jeffress isn’t a Baptist, since he seems to be unaware that meanness is a prized quality in some ministers of that faith community. I once saw a cap on sale at a convenience store in South Georgia with a message that expressed the approach perfectly: “Read the Bible daily. It will scare the Hell out of you.”
In any event, it will be interesting to see if the new Mean Mike persona cuts into the relatively good press Huck is used to getting from people who don’t actually agree with him on much of anything. Indeed, that could be part of the idea: How can “the base” fully get on the bandwagon of anyone smiled upon by the godless liberal media? If that doesn’t work, maybe Huckabee will have to put away the bass guitar.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 6, 2014
“So Much For Republican Rebranding”: The Mike Huckabee Boomlet Betrays The GOP’s Lack Of Seriousness
Since Mike Huckabee delivered his anti-contraception “Uncle Sugar” speech to the RNC two weeks ago, he has catapulted to the top of two GOP presidential primary polls.
Yes, that is what it takes to become the Republican frontrunner these days. Not innovative policy solutions. Not an impressive legislative record. No, what you need is to let loose a politically incorrect swipe at a liberal caricature, stir up a bunch of media outrage, and Republican primary voters will want to give you the nuclear codes.
The Republican Party is suffering record low favorability and struggling to be seen as capable of governing. And the Huckabee boomlet provides the latest evidence that the party’s rank-and-file are still allergic to seriousness.
With the first 2016 primary contests two years away, Republicans have already begun replicating the dynamic of the 2012 primaries. Last time around, primary voters fleetingly embraced anyone, regardless of their plausibility, so long as they tossed out fresh “cable catnip” to make liberal heads explode. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum… The revolving door of unpresidential wingnuts reduced the Republican primary to a traveling circus, hamstringing eventual nominee Mitt Romney as he struggled to keep up in the pander parade.
Another circus is not what party poo-bahs have in mind. Indeed, they’re already moving to condense the primary schedule and wrest some control of the debates away from the media in hopes of dialing down the nuttiness.
Wipe the dust off of the RNC’s year-old “autopsy” of its 2012 debacle, and you’ll find a forgotten plan to “Promote Our Governors” because they “have campaigned and governed in a manner that is inclusive and appealing. They point the way forward … working successfully with their legislatures to enact meaningful changes in people’s lives.” In other words, the governors were supposed to be the ones with the ideas to make the party look serious again.
But over the course of 2013, the only governor that got widely promoted — or, more accurately, promoted himself — was New Jersey’s Chris Christie, and we know how that turned out. Other governors touted in the autopsy have had their own struggles, be it Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, who was recently indicted for corruption, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal ,who flopped trying scrap his state’s income tax, or Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who is polling below 50 percent in his re-election campaign this year.
There are other low-key Republican governors who are doing just fine. In particular, Nevada’s Brian Sandoval is hugely popular, and is a swing state Latino to boot. Unlike the controversial Walker, Sandoval doesn’t even have a serious opponent to his re-election this year. But he’s popular because he is governing pragmatically, implementing ObamaCare in good faith and forging budget compromises that raise some tax revenue. And so he is completely ignored by Republican primary voters.
The upshot is this: No Republican governor begins the race as a top-tier presidential candidate. No Republican governor’s ideas are reshaping and rebranding the party. And a joke candidate like Huckabee can waltz into the lead, however briefly, with a low-rent crack.
Why are Republicans insistent on setting themselves up for more mockery? Because conservative obsession with fighting political correctness clouds their political thinking, compelling them to repeatedly alienate the moderate voters they need to get back in the game.
Many conservative Republicans seem to believe that political correctness is such a societal scourge, silencing ideas and warping debate, that it must be fought at all costs — even at the cost of forgoing new ideas.
This is why RNC Chair Reince Priebus was engaging in folly last week when he dropped everything to demand MSNBC apologize for a tweet suggesting the “right wing” is racist (after the network had already apologized). He was scratching the Republicans’ politically incorrect itch, instead of finding the ointment.
Priebus can cram the primary schedule down to two weeks and turn every debate into an infomercial. But until he can clamp down on the victimhood and crank up the idea machine, 2016 will be another cacophonous GOP circus.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, February 4, 2014
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