[Dialogue] Huckabee's charming demagoguery

Sun Nov 25 11:08:37 EST 2007

The full article is at  HYPERLINK
"http://www.alternet.org/story/68057/"http://www.alternet.org/story/68057/
It’s frequently profane, which I’ve edited from the excerpts.   

Jim Rippey in Bellevue, NE 

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Mike Huckabee Is Not a Sane Man, By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com   1124-07

Mike Huckabee … tells a hell of a story. Let your guard down anywhere near
the former Arkansas governor and he'll pod you, Body Snatchers-style --
you'll wake up drooling, your brain gone, riding a back seat on the
bandwagon that suddenly has him charging toward the lead in the GOP race.
It almost happened to me a few months ago at a fundraiser in Great Falls,
Virginia …. (After) an impromptu address, Huckabee ….  sought me out,
apparently having been briefed that Rolling Stone was in the house.

"I'm glad you're here," he told me. "I finally get to tell someone who cares
about Keith Richards."  Before I could respond, Huckabee plowed into a long
and very entertaining story …..  about how Richards and Ron Wood got pulled
over for reckless driving while on tour in Fordyce in 1975. Richards ended
up getting a misdemeanor conviction -- an injustice that stood for
thirty-one years, until Huckabee, a would-be rock musician himself, stepped
in and pardoned Richards last year. “Hey, if you can play guitar like Keith
Richards, I'll consider pardoning you, too." …. he went on to tell me about
the band he plays bass for, and how he has jammed with the likes of Percy
Sledge and Grand Funk Railroad …. Ten minutes later, driving away, I caught
myself thinking: Hey, this guy doesn't seem like a total dickhead. I can
almost see him as president. .... Then I woke up and did some homework that
changed my mind. But I confess: It took a little while. Huckabee is that
good.

Ever since Huckabee turned in a dominating performance at a summit of
Christian voters in Washington a few weeks ago, he has been riding a surge
among likely Iowa voters …. The media, like me, have been charmed by their
initial impression: "It's hard not to like Mike Huckabee," gushed Newsweek.
….

But all the attention on his salesmanship skills obscures the real
significance of his rise within the Republican Party ….  a marriage of
Christian fundamentalism with economic populism. Rather than employing the
patented Bush-Rove tactic of using abortion and gay rights to hoodwink
low-income Christians …. Huckabee is a bigger-government Republican who
emphasizes prison reform and poverty relief …. He’s…. a cross between John
Edwards and Jerry Falwell, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher who
actually seems to (care) about the working poor.

But Huckabee is also full-blown nuts …. He believes the Earth may be only
6,000 years old, angrily rejects the evidence that human beings evolved from
"primates" and thinks America wouldn't need so much Mexican labor if we
allowed every aborted fetus to grow up and enter the workforce. To top it
off, Huckabee also left behind a record of ethical missteps in the swamp of
Arkansas politics …. On October 30th, fresh off new polls showing him
gaining ground all over the country, Huckabee holds an informal round-table
luncheon with ….  the esteemed Washington bureau reps of the big dailies and
the newsweeklies …. 

The luncheon starts out friendly …. But …. One reporter asks how his support
of the "fair tax" (an alternative to the flat tax that some conservatives
believe is skewed in favor of low-income Americans) qualifies as
conservative; two others badger him about raising taxes to build roads in
Arkansas …. What the press doesn't understand is that Huckabee has changed
the equation of party-specific orthodoxies. A generation of GOP candidates
have used the poor as a whipping-post stage prop, complaining about lazy,
frantically copulating homeless fiends living in cars, (hurting) the
property values of Decent Folk. Huck turns that rhetoric around by saying,
"We shouldn't allow a child to live under a bridge or in the back seat of a
car." It's a brilliant innovation for a candidate like Huckabee, who
recognizes that the only thing he has to lose by talking about poverty and
high CEO salaries is the support of the big-money wing of his party --
something he doesn't have anyway.

Choosing that strategy also allows Huckabee to do what no evangelical since
Jimmy Carter has, which is talk about his faith in terms of sympathy for the
underprivileged. "You can't just say 'respect life' exclusively in the
gestation period," he says. Huckabee also edges openly into class politics,
criticizing his own party for harping on the supposed success of the overall
economy. "The reality is, there are many families that really are working as
hard or harder than they've ever worked in their lives, and they're not
seeing that pay off," he says.

For Huckabee, such lines aren't just lip service. As governor of Arkansas,
he outraged Republicans with his plan to expand health coverage for children
…. and his support for subsidized higher education for the children of
illegal immigrants. Worse still, from a Republican standpoint, Huckabee
showed little hesitation in raising taxes to pay for such …. Even Max
Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times and one of Huckabee's most ferocious
critics, concedes that the candidate's populism isn't an act. "I don't
question his sincerity on that," he says of Huckabee …. "He identifies with
ordinary people."  …. it's been ages since conservative voters had any
viable alternatives to the soak-the-poor elitism of Newt Gingrich and George
Bush. But that may be changing. Huckabee's current surge on the national
scene mirrors the rise during the 2006 midterm elections of so-called "Blue
Dog" Democrats …. who helped unseat the Republican majority in Congress with
a mix of populist economics and religious dogma …. 

Coupled with his apparent gift for wooing the ….  national media class,
Huckabee's seizure of political territory long claimed by the corporate
right is what makes him so dangerous. Because for all his political waffling
in other areas -- Huckabee has flip-flopped on a host of earthly political
issues, from taxes to local control of school boards -- he leaves absolutely
no doubt about his commitment to religious wackohood. …. Huckabee gave an
even more damning glimpse into his inner self in a recent appearance at the
Prestonwood Baptist Church near Dallas, where he told audiences that
Christians are sitting in the pole position of the race to Armageddon. "If
you're with Jesus Christ, we know how it turns out in the final moment," he
said. "I've read the last chapter in the book, and we do end up winning." ….

The troubling thing about Huckabee's God rhetoric is that a man who is glad
that Christians will "win" at Armageddon must be happy about the rest of us
losing. …. This God stuff isn't just talk with Huck. One of his first acts
as governor was to block Medicaid from funding an abortion for a mentally
retarded teenager who had been raped by her stepfather -- an act in direct
violation of federal law, which requires states to pay for abortions in
cases of rape …. As president, Huck would support a constitutional amendment
banning abortion and would give science a back seat to religion. ….
Huckabee's well-documented disdain for science was reflected in the
performance of the Arkansas school system when he was governor; one
independent survey gave the state an F for its science standards in schools,
a grade that among other things reflected Huckabee's hostility toward the
teaching of evolution….

Huckabee also has a televangelist's knack for getting caught with his
fingers in various cookie jars. In his first year as governor, Huck used a
$60,000 taxpayer fund for personal expenses like dog food, pantyhose and
meals at Taco Bell …. and used inaugural funds to pay for clothes for his
wife. "Mike is first and foremost about Mike," says Brantley. "He'll
nickel-and-dime whoever he can to line his pockets."  Huckabee has also been
accused of paying himself as a consultant to his own senatorial campaign,
allowing special interests to pay for airline tickets for his daughter ….
setting up a "wedding registry" at Target and Dillard's department stores so
citizens could lavish the Huckabees with gifts as they renewed their
marriage vows. The long list of desired goodies included twenty-four
settings of Lenox "Holiday Nouveau" china …. (and    the registry noted.
"Target GiftCards are welcome."

Brantley suggests that a lot of this behavior stems from a Southern
tradition of ponying up to the local preacher. "If you're the pastor of a
church and you've got a guy who owns a men's clothing store, you expect the
guy to give you a couple of new suits every year," says Brantley. "But
Huckabee continued on like that as governor." …. So far, Huckabee's greedy
past hasn't prevented him from surging in the polls. Unlike the rest of the
woefully underwhelming field of Republican candidates, Huckabee is a
sincere, ideologically in-tune champion of a massive and frustrated
conservative demographic. The fact that he is succeeding in spite of his
obvious and undisguised lunacy is a testament to the desperation of the
voting public, which is so hungry for a candidate who actually responds to
its needs that it may be willing to overlook extraordinary levels of
kookiness. ….

Make no mistake, Huckabee can win this thing. None of his four main rivals
…. can claim to represent the Christian right. His biggest problem is money:
…. Huck has largely been ignored by the big-money players …. But even here
he is steadily gaining: After raising $6,000 a day in the first quarter, he
is now racking up $30,000 a day, much of it from small donors. That money
could enable Huckabee to compete hard in Iowa, New Hampshire and South
Carolina …. 

When Huckabee talks like this, he sounds like what he is -- the Howard Dean
of the Republican Party, an insurgent candidate who shot toward the top by
appealing to a disaffected base. But …. populist campaigns have a way of
imploding under the glare of the modern campaign process. …. Charm only goes
so far if you're full-bore nuts. ….

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