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I'm getting a real bad feeling about this whole 'Huckabubble' thing going on. Huckabee won the Iowa caucus running away, which wasn't supposed to happen. Supposedly, the pundits are saying he's got no chance in New Hampshire -- John McCain is everybody's new golden boy -- but I don't know. If crazy Ron Paul could get 10% of the vote in Iowa, anything can happen.
What I worry about most is how easily Huckabee is falling into that cozy place in people's perceptions as just a regular kind of guy, one who plays bass and shoots stuff up, the kind of guy you wouldn't mind having a beer with. Sound familiar?
I'm sensing a distinct coat of Teflon emerging in this guy's campaign, too.
Huckabee joked about shooting people who didn't caucus for him a few weeks back, but that's no problem for the media who, apparently, are so taken with him that they sort of missed the fact that there's about one gun massacre every two weeks in this country. Forget Virginia Tech, this guy is charming!
Then there's his take on the Benazir Bhutto assassination. Watch out for those Pakistanis coming across the border, he says! There are so many things wrong with his entire way of thinking on this issue, but you won't hear any of it discussed in the media -- it's the horse race stupid!
What his linking events in Pakistan to immigration tells me about this guy is that he hasn't got one iota of foreign policy experience, which is what I thought was going to be the big thing this year. Voters are supposedly leery of any candidate who knows as little about the world as W. did. See the mess his ignorance got us into?
Now comes Huckabee with his invading hordes of Pakistanis and wham, bam, thank you ma'am, he's the front runner. (And that particular "gaff" is already down the memory hole never to be brought up again.) This time around no is going to dare "ambush" him with any tough questions about who the president of France is, that's for sure.
You may say I'm overreacting. Perhaps. Sure, you may say, he might get the nomination, there's no way he can win the general election, though. I say, why not? He appeals to the Reagan Democrat demo, his "fair tax" idea is a "fiscally conservative" Republican's wet dream. Huckabee may have grown up "one generation from dirt floors" but his sale's tax plan will surely have us all back there in less than a generation, which is manna to his base.
And the relatively well off white guys, either Democratic or Republican, who think they're doing good but they're a little worried about the way the economy is going are not about to vote for a woman or a black guy. There's a lot of primary fever going on right now, Democrats are gushing all over themselves about Obama mania, but the one thing everyone is forgetting is that, this is a country that voted twice (or at least once) for George W. Bush. You don't go from that to electing a black guy or a woman in four years.
People may talk a good game about voting for "change," but when it comes down to it, when they get into that voting both, they're going to go for the white guy who plays bass and wants to cut their taxes. Even if everything looks like it's going to be a landslide for Hillary or Obama, you may wake up the next morning with a nasty shock (no one is going to admit to a pollster they'd never vote for a black or a woman).
As a lifelong Democrat, I have to say we only have two choices facing us: Either we pit our red-neck sounding guy, John Edwards, against their real red-neck guy, Mike Huckabee, or we draft Al Gore to be the nominee. That's the only way we win this election. White middle-class folks, especially upper middle-class folks, aren't going to be in any mood to take a chance with a minority as president, particularly if the economy is in the dumper, which most likely it will be.
Huckabee will have Ed Rollins in the background firing up the economic/class knuckleheads in the party, Huckabee himself has got the evangelicals fired up and how on earth is Hillary going to combat the Chuck Norris contingent? And when things really get nasty, rest assured, from an undisclosed location somewhere in Texas, Karl Rove will be engineering his dirty tricks (for a rather large fee, naturally).
When primary time comes to Pennsylvania, I'm writing in Al Gore. I don't think any of these other candidates have an ice cube's chance in the South of winning a general election, except, as I said, maybe John Edwards.
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