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We haven't discussed Mike Huckabee's charming little attempt at stirring up racial fears, but there's something important to be noted. In case you missed it, Huckabee was on a right-wing radio show when he was asked about Barack Obama's birth certificate, and gave what has become the typical Republican answer, I'm-not-saying-he's-not-American-but-gee-I-don't-know. Then he said this:
But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.When his lie about Obama growing up in Kenya started to get attention, Huckabee sent out a spokesman to try some damage control: "Governor Huckabee simply misspoke when he alluded to President Obama growing up in 'Kenya.' The Governor meant to say the President grew up in Indonesia." Forget about the fact that Obama didn't grow up in Indonesia either, he spent four years there. But the idea that Huckabee "misspoke" is transparent baloney -- was he under the impression that the Mau Mau rebellion happened in Indonesia? Joe Klein makes the appropriate point: "When I was growing up, Mau Mau was shorthand for: Extremely Scary Black People. The brutality of the Mau Mau rebellion was legendary (and, who knows, perhaps even accurate). It became a term of art in the sixties: to mau-mau was to intimidate white people." This has been an essential component of the far-right case against Obama from the beginning. As GOP consultant Alex Castellanos, who knows a thing or two about race-baiting, said in early 2008, "All the sudden you've got two dots, and two dots make a line/ You start getting some sense of who he is, and it's not the Obama you thought. He's not the Tiger Woods of politics." In other words, he's not the non-threatening black man, he's the threatening black man. Someone should ask Huckabee this: what is "our" view of the Mau Mau rebellion, that Obama is not supposed to share? That's a contrast with the view that "the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather"? Is "our" view that the British were not imperialists, but were just there to civilize the brutes, as an act of global generosity? Please, governor, explain. Then yesterday, Huckabee doubled down, telling yet another right-wing host, "I do think he has a different worldview and I think it's, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas." Not that he's saying Obama is foreign or Muslim or anything.Mike Huckabee is a friendly guy. Unlike, say, Newt Gingrich, he smiles a lot. If you had to share a car with him for an hour, you'd probably come away thinking he's a lovely fella who'd lend you his lawn mower if you needed it. But that shouldn't blind anyone to the fact that Huckabee not only has loathsome views, but has demonstrated a willingness to play on everything that's ugly and hateful in people. Encouraging other people to feed their own fear and racism doesn't make you a racist. But it does make you pretty despicable, no matter how friendly you seem.And the fact that this happened on a conservative talk radio show, where Huckabee probably assumed only other conservatives were listening, is revealing too. Politicians almost invariably portray themselves as possessed of uncommon courage -- every vote they take is "standing up" to somebody powerful, every policy position they take is an act of daring. It would have taken a bit of courage for Huckabee to say to this radio host, "Well hold on there, Barack Obama's as American as you or I, I just disagree with him on a lot of things." But instead of doing that, he decided to dive into a pit of ugliness and swim around for a while.
