Religious right’s warped icon: Why Mike Huckabee could be wingnuts’ best white hope

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/religious_rights_warped_hero_why_mike_huckabee_could_be_gops_best_shot_in_16/



Imagine the smug smile of the Gipper plus the nasty politics of Ted Cruz. Why it's a mistake to count Huckabee out

Religious right’s warped icon: Why Mike Huckabee could be wingnuts’ best white hope
Heather Digby Parton
Wednesday, Sep 17, 2014 06:59 AM EST

Anyone starting to pay attention to the wide open Republican 2016 presidential field has to have wondered why in the world the charismatic, rock-star preacher TV celebrity from Arkansas hadn’t made any moves to join the race. In a field dominated by, well … nobody … you’d think that the guitar-playing former Gov. Mike Huckabee would see that the nation is inevitably going to turn its desperate eyes to him. But until a poll out of Iowa showed Huckabee in first place — way ahead of his next rival Paul Ryan — there was hardly even a whisper of his name in pundit circles. Now it’s everywhere.

Byron York reported that Huckabee called reporters together yesterday for a wide-ranging conversation about the Middle East (he’s very concerned) and a possible presidential run and it looks like he’s getting back in the saddle. York observes that unlike his run in 2008 where he lamented all the chatter about Iraq, he’s going straight at foreign policy as the focus of his campaign, rather than domestic issues, which would appear to signal that the GOP is getting back in its comfortable groove. (Not that this should come as a surprise — Benghazi!™ was a pretty good first clue.)

Some of this reticence to put their hopes and dreams once again in the other man from Hope is understandable. After all, he declined to join the losing GOP clown show in 2012 after having made a fairly decent showing in 2008. (What most people would call having good political instincts is often seen among the faithful as a sign of disloyalty.) In that race, Rick Santorum was left to carry the banner for the Christian right pretty much by himself and while he did a surprisingly respectable job of sticking it out to the bitter end, there’s really nobody in the world who can see him sitting in the Oval Office, not even his own voters. Huckabee, on the other hand, has long been seen as a serious contender and for good reason. Nobody else in the Republican game today has his particular combination of political gifts. Why they’re almost, dare I say it, Reaganesque.

David Freedlander of the Daily Beast profiled Huckabee a few months back and observed that his once sunny-ish persona has been replaced with an angry fire-and-brimstone messenger of doom. It appears that the “Caring Mike” who once angered Grover Norquist with his “populist” apostasy about taxing a couple of rich guys for the illusory common good has transformed into “Mean Mike” who says the women of America “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,” and wonders why it is that Christians “take it in the teeth time and time again.” Freedlander says that people who know Huckabee are divided about what’s responsible for this change. One side says it’s Huckabee the politician who has adapted his style to the political zeitgeist. The world is darker and meaner than it was in 2008, they say, and so he is simply reflecting the mood of the people. The other side says that he’s acquired a special conservative form of Stockholm syndrome, which happens to those who spend all their time in the right-wing noise machine, which is a very, very angry place.