Feminism would have led to more dead women on the Titanic. Health insurance covering contraception is an insult to women. Democrats think women cannot control their libido. Beyonce’s music is toxic. Every single illegal immigrant needs to be deported. The Constitution should become more like the Bible. God has the power to nullify the Supreme Court’s decisions. The IRS needs to be abolished. Gay people are basically just struggling with an unhealthy addiction, like alcoholics are. Asking a Christian to accept gay marriage in the country is equivalent to mandating that Jewish delis serve bacon. AIDS carriers should be quarantined. Transgender people are faking it to peek in locker rooms. Actual child molesters, though, should be immune to media scrutiny, if they are repentant to God.
If you are not offended or confused yet, you would probably like Mike Huckabee. He deems those people “the Bubbas” and he had better hope that there are a whole lot more of them in America than polling and common sense suggest.
Huckabee was born in Hope, Arkansas, which happens to be Bill Clinton’s hometown as well. From an early age he developed an interest in God and public speaking. Unsurprisingly, he went on to become a preacher. He briefly became head of the Southern Baptists in Arkansas before unsuccessfully running for a Senate seat and losing. However, his fortunes quickly changed when he won the lieutenant governorship of the state and the governor was incarcerated.
As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee was surprisingly moderate. He mandated that insurance companies provide contraception, for example, and actively worked to advance the interests of African-Americans. For this he earned a surprisingly high share of their votes and the endorsement of several prominent African-American leaders when he ran for the presidency in 2008. Speaking of that run, he did reasonably well in the 2008 Republican primaries and finished in third behind John McCain and Mitt Romney. Afterward he got a show on Fox as the Tea Party became ascendant. At least one of those developments fundamentally changed him as a politician.
Huckabee has been an extremely vocal critic of LGBT rights over the last few years and has often been more extreme than almost any other candidate. While the rest of the field offered silence or tepid support to Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out, Huckabee took the moment to rail against the transgender community and suggest that they were all just perverts. He’s had some downright bizarre statements on gay marriage and gay people in general along the way. In the last few weeks, he’s suggested that states, individuals or churches should try to practice “civil disobedience” to a potential Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage. He had previously called for supporters to honor a “Chick-Fil-A appreciation day” to counter a boycott spearheaded by the LGBT community.
He’s also shifted to the right on issues where he was previously moderate. Gone are his days of support for limited amnesty. Now he believes that every single illegal immigrant should be deported and an impenetrable barrier built before we can even talk about immigration reform. He backpedaled on his support for contraception access as the Hobby Lobby case unfolded. His rhetoric became less about compassion and pragmatic conservatism and more about ideological extremism, Christian fundamentalism and Southern pride.
Speaking of that, he does at least have the most interesting book title of any candidate: Gods, Guns, Grits, and Gravy. In it he claims that the coastal city folk (implicitly liberals) are different from the real Americans of the South and Heartland who need to take their country back. This more or less defines his campaign strategy.
He’s trying to win the deep red states and to sweep the South, building up momentum to win the nomination along the way. His hope is that he can convince the Tea Party that he is a candidate who can actually win the general election due to his governorship and ties to the Establishment even if he himself is a staunch social conservative at heart. Then maybe enough center-right voters could get behind him that he could build a coalition and win as a compromise candidate. The problem is that with the Tea Party split amongst Carson, Paul, and Cruz, and usually not focused upon the ability to win general elections, he could struggle to get support there. Given his rightward shifts in recent years, a lot of mainstream conservatives might also be hesitant to send him against Hillary Clinton.
I expect that matchup would be a slaughter. Simply put, Huckabee has said way too many sketchy things about women, feminism and birth control to be able to dispel the Democrats’ accusations of a war on women. When running against a female candidate the problem would be exacerbated. Also tricky is his stance against abortion in cases of rape and incest. While many Americans might agree in theory, 2012 interviews showed those stances can lead to awful statements when trying to defend them in a live debate. And you had better believe Hillary would push him on that. Furthermore Huckabee’s reliance upon Southern voters does him little good in the electoral college since any Republican would take almost every Southern state. While he’s run against the Clinton machine before and prevailed, that was in Arkansas where his “Bubbas” form an actual majority.
But as the frequent outrage to Huckabee’s statements shows, it seems improbable that the same holds true for the actual real America.