The likelihood of the Governor from Hope taking on the Goliath of the Republican establishment and winning the Republican nomination seems minimal. However, has anyone checked his pockets? There just might be five smooth stones in there.
LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - I arrived home late from Washington D.C. Thursday evening. So, I could only watch a portion of the Republican debate which was held in Florida only days before its 'winner takes all' primary.
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I will leave to others to summarize who said what and why the Republican candidates did not attack one another this time. After all, we have to be kind to the chattering class these days; they need to make a living and their numbers seem to be growing.
I simply want to call attention to one dimension of the event, the allotment of time given to the candidates. Perhaps someone can tell me why Mitt Romney, the newest favorite of the Republican Party establishment and elite since Giuliani made his strategic error, got 22 minutes to present his positions and Mike Huckabee, the new whipping boy of the same group, only got 11 minutes?
I suggest it may be for the same reason that Huckabee continues to be treated by so many party pundits, such as Charles Krauthammer, with condescension.
He is a threat to their long standing hold on power within that Party.
How often have we been told by one pundit after another that the former Governor from Arkansas is the “Evangelical” candidate with little chance of winning?
How many times has he been savaged by radio commentators for not being a “true conservative” because he does not carry the water of those who for so long have ruled the roost of a Party which rebuilt itself on the backs of pro-life religious voters but never really found a “place at the table” for them.
The annoying condescension directed toward Huckabee in the columns of conservatives and neo-conservatives and the inane comments from television pundits and panels are getting old.
The latest example of this condescension was Charles Krauthammer’s Jan 25th piece in the Washington Post. He came right out and told the readers that the former Governor from Arkansas was not going to win. He then offered him the written equivalent of a demeaning pat on the head and saying that he ‘meant well’:
“Mike Huckabee is not going to be president. The loss in South Carolina, one of the most highly evangelical states in the union, made that plain. With a ceiling of 14 percent among nonevangelical Republicans, Huckabee's base is simply too narrow. But his was not a rise and then a fall.
He came from nowhere to establish himself as the voice of an important national constituency. Huckabee will continue to matter, and he might even carry enough remaining Southern states to wield considerable influence at a fractured Republican convention.”
Frankly, I am tired of hearing the same talking points from the pundits against Governor Huckabee. It is no accident that the real opposition to his candidacy has come, not from Democrats, but from Republicans.
Perhaps they are afraid of him because he presents a fresh vision and a coherent worldview which calls into question their own confused approach. Perhaps he is also perceived as a threat to their control over the future agenda of the Republican Party at a critical time in its history.
Huckabee’s manner and his message, when he is allowed to speak, strike a chord with many people from a broad spectrum of increasingly disillusioned voters. Because of that, the elites try to marginalize him through condescension, like Krauthammer did.
Or , worse yet, they unleash vitriol against him, such as what Mark Levin stooped to in his Thursday talk radio program when he made himself small by crude remarks against this good man .
The attacks against the Governor from Hope, Arkansas, have followed a predictable pattern.
First, there was the way in which his “Evangelical appeal” was treated by these media personalities. I have been around for a long time, and I never accepted the idea that evangelical Protestants were ever really welcome in the ruling ranks of the Republican Party.
As a pro-life, pro-marriage and family, pro-freedom and pro-poor Catholic, I found myself by their side many times, simply because I had to leave the Democratic Party when that once great party of working men and women stopped up their ears to the cry of the poor in the womb.
I was never under any delusion that I was welcome in the Republican Party. However, I actually think that some evangelical Protestants really thought they had found, to use the rhetoric of Ralph Reed, one of the architects of the “religious right”, a “place at the table” among the party elite.
The way that Huckabee and his evangelical supporters are now being treated by the Republican establishment should expose the truth and calls this ...
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