Sunday, January 13, 2008

MIKE HUCKABEE

What's To Like About Huck?

This post brought a few messages of consternation from readers who can't see any reason to call Mike Huckabee "a gifted communicator who could do great things for the Republican party."

I don't know if this will persuade anyone, but here's where I'm coming from... If you're a member of any one of the "legs of the stool" in the Reaganite/conservative coalition, you're used to being portrayed in the media as... well, the last word of "legs of the stool" but with a different meaning, if you catch my drift. If you're an economic conservative, you're painted as a greedy miser, refusing to give government much-needed funds to take care of orphans, old people, and kittens. If you're a hawk who believes in a tough, aggressive stance against foreign threats, you're painted as a bloodthirsty warmonger, often in the service of a secretive, sinister cabal.

But I think we can give the "Most Endlessly Smeared" award to the social conservatives, who want a society where moms and dads don't have their daughters to grow up to be a slow-motion train wreck like one of the Spears sisters, and as a result have been painted as intolerant, hateful, ignorant, enraged, repressed, and snake-handling, ever since the Washington Post stated as fact in a front page story that they were "poor, uneducated, and easy to command."

Enter Mike Huckabee on the national stage.

If Huckabee's the nominee, the media may yet attempt to portray him as a fundamentalist maniac. They may even succeed, by, among other things, recycling an old quote from a time in which his tongue rapidly outpaced his brain and he suggested that among the problems facing America was "publicly endorsed and institutionally supported" necrophilia.

But the Huckabee we see on the campaign trail today - bass guitar-playing, joke-telling, always deploying the right anecdote at the right time, ol' Huck - has already become one of the most influential social conservatives in America today. And he'll retain that title, even if his campaign crashes and burns in the near future (and that doesn't seem terribly likely).

The various causes of social conservatism - the promotion of a culture of life; the desire for entertainment options that won't teach your kids the exact wrong lesson; the commodification and commercialization of childhood; a healthy caution of strip-mining human embryos for the miracle cure du jour that scientists promise to deliver; the desire for a community where the values of the family are reinforced when the kids walk out the front door - they could use a gifted advocate. Too often the most high-profile advocates of these causes hand their enemies plenty of ammunition - must I name names?

I have my gripes with Huckabee, but when this show is over, I don't want him to wrap up his tent and go home. The man's a fighter, a communicator, and a silver-tongued persuader - skills the Republican Party doesn't exactly have a surplus of these days.

01/13 10:40 PMShare