December 12, 2007
The first thing people deny, of course, is often what they think you think they are. And they know you might have a reason to think it. And so we have Mike Huckabee, insurgent Republican candidate for President, with this gem:
It’s not that we want to impose our religion on somebody. It’s that we want to shape the culture and laws by using a worldview we believe has value.’
Well, that's just classic. We won't impose our religious values on the general population-- we'll just make laws based on our religious values.
It's fun to watch Huckabee run. He must be driving Giuliani and Romney crazy-- he has no money, no full-time fund-raising staff, no advertising, no speech-writers. Yet there he sits, among or at the top of the polls for Iowa and Florida, and just driving them crazy because they have spent millions on this moment and now it's not theirs.
Naturally, he is going to be a sweetheart for the media for a while. A man without a paid staff is an accessible man, a man who gives interviews, a man with nothing to hide. It's very hard to stay that way if you become a contender. If you are close, so close, do you want to blow it all off by continuing to speak from the heart? Don't you want to run that by a consultant first? Don't you want to test-poll that position before a select group of average voters?
But by then the fun will be gun and the big guns will be out and the party will close ranks. If Huckabee is what he thinks he is, a loose cannon who actually believes things and can't be manipulated like a George Bush, he will scare the hell out of the establishments of both parties.