Huckabee’s pitch
by digby
I wrote about him for Salon this morning
Yesterday, Mike Huckabee, the guitar-playing, Nugent-loving, ex-Governor preacher from Arkansas, announced that he is running for president. This was not unexpected, but it’s always a treat to hear him give a full-blown speech. He’s very talented, after all, at doing what he does best — stoking resentment among the white working class and lifting up the spirits of social conservatives. Often they are the same people. And they are all Mike Huckabee’s people.
In his speech yesterday, Huckabee hit all the right notes to get crowd excited. He pledged to repeal Obamacare and promised instead to adopt what he called a “curative approach,” which means he thinks we should concentrate on curing diseases rather than treating them. It’s an unusual policy, to say the least, but considering who he is and his background as a fundamentalist preacher it’s always possible that he thinks this can be accomplished through faith healing. So there’s that.
On the other hand, he heartily defended Social Security, a very wise move that you would think all the Republican candidates would adopt, considering the average age of their base voter. He also, however, defended Medicare against the encroachment of the evil Obamacare, following a successful GOP strategy since 2010: convincing the elderly that the federal government wants to put them all on the proverbial ice floe in order to give their hard earned health care to people who don’t deserve it.
Huckabee also took a very hard line on national security, characterizing Islamic militants in serpentine terms:
When I hear our current president say he wants Christians to get off their high horse so we can make nice with radical jihadists, I wonder if he could watch a Western from the 50s and be able to figure out who they good guys and the bad guys really are. As president, I promise you that we will no longer try to merely contain jihadism, we will conquer it! We will deal with jihadis just as we would deal with deadly snakes.
Once again showing his savvy recognition of the age of his likely voter, he evoked an image only people who were born in the first half of the 20th century would understand. (People of more recent vintage might just think the “bad guys” of those movies were the intended “good guys,” and vice versa.) It’s fair to say that Huckabee, like most of the GOP pack, promises a national security policy based on old cowboy movies. (And it wouldn’t be the first time.)
Read on. I doubt Huckabee can win the nomination. It’s a crowded field and there are others who can lay claim to this crowd and also raise the necessary money. But he’s such a pure representation of a certain right wing mindset that I find him to be an endlessly interesting character.
And hey, you never know. The New York Times published a new poll yesterday:
Republican voters showed the most openness to considering Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and former Govs. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Jeb Bush of Florida among their party’s presidential contenders, the survey found.
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