SOFT ON HUCKABEE. I spent some time last night looking further into former-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's record and have been racking my brain for an explanation as to why the national press has been so willing to accept his aw-shucks Mr. Nice Guy act without scrutiny (I'm sure commenters will have plenty of explanations of their own).
Part of it is certainly the fact that he's raised so little money no one was taking him seriously until he came in second in the Ames Straw Poll, and non-viable candidates tend not to be scrutinized as carefully by reporters. Part of it is that he was, by all accounts, a reasonably good governor in his home state of Arkansas, and unusually invested in the creation of social welfare programs for a Republican. (What is novel tends to get more coverage than what is typical). Some of it is because he is genuinely funny and quick on his feet with a quip and a quote -- behavior endearing to reporters, who live by good quote. The policy agnosticism of political reporters who are trying to explain Huckabee and others to the world from the inside, as the candidates see themselves, or who write horserace and optics stories rather than analytic ones has also played a role. And part of it, I fear, is that there just aren't enough women in the national political press corps for his anti-modern social agenda to be widely seen as the sort of regressive and radical threat that it is. So Huckabee pardoned Keith Richards and plays "Free Bird." That doesn't make him Rock 'n' Roll. That makes him a poseur.
I mean, just look at his agenda. Mr. Guitar-Rocker Folksy Nice Guy wants to: eliminate all contraception education in schools; use our tax dollars to fund ideological and ineffective abstinence education programs in those schools; and get rid of condom distribution in schools in favor of Bible distribution programs that have been overturned by the courts. He favors: a federal marriage amendment to the U.S. constitution; a human life amendment; the teaching of creationism to children; and the South Dakota law that banned all abortions and was so extreme the state's own highly traditionalist voters overturned it in a referendum.
