Wednesday, December 19, 2007

What Huckabee Really Means   [Byron York]

Mike Huckabee was on the "Today" show this morning. Meredith Viera asked him to react to Rich's remark that nominating Huckabee would be suicide for the Republican party. Huckabee began with his standard line about how he is not part of the "Wall Street-to-Washington axis, this corridor of power." "They don't control me," Huckabee said. "I'm not one of theirs. I'm not one of those guys that just owe my soul to the people on Wall Street. I'm not a wholly-owned subsidiary of them. I don't live in the circles of power in Washington. I really do come right up from the people."

Fine. Then Huckabee got into what is really the basis of his appeal for many voters. He's tapping into that new sort of evangelicalism, that Rick Warren-style worldview that David Brooks and others have been writing about for a few years now. It is real, it is different from older-style evangelicalism, as well as from economic or national-security conservatism, and Huckabee has his finger on it:

Huckabee: There's a sense in which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by the Republican Party. They wanted us to be a part of it. And then one day one of us actually runs, and they say, Oh, my gosh. Now they're serious. They don't want to just show up and vote. They actually would want to be a part of the discussion, and really talk about issues that include hunger and poverty and things that ought to be really a concern to every American, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative.

Viera: Do you think they're afraid that you would impose evangelical principles on people?

Huckabee: No, that's total nonsense, because I was a governor ten and a half years. I've got more record as an executive running a government than anybody running. So they've got plenty of things to look at. And I never did propose that we would impose our religion on somebody else. What I did do was improve children's health, education, the road system. But we didn't do it just for the people at the top. The tax policies and other things we did, it helped the people at the bottom so they might have a chance to live the American dream. For that, I apologize to no one.

12/19 11:57 AMShare