Huckabee, Huckabee!

Huckabee has just perhaps  thrown his hat to run for the office of the President in a most peculiar way. (1)> He attempted once before , and now in some way he thinks he's got a chance?A new Washington Post profile reveals that Huckabee is in the early stages of mounting a 2016 campaign, but doing so in a way that deliberately lets him keep his Fox News contract and weekly show. Huckabee's tightrope walk -- essentially running for office but avoiding directly saying so -- once again reveals the farcical nature of the network's relationship with contributors-turned-political candidates.Fox News and Mike Huckabee are finally parting ways as the now former host explores a second presidential run. After serving as the governor of Arkansas and losing a 2008 presidential primary bid, Huckabee was hired by the network. His media career was rife with controversial comments and outright falsehoods. If you look at this close-ly, you will notice how fractured the Republican party really is . We've got  Jeb's , Perry's , Rubio's and the Cruz'z . While Mitt Romney remains a ghost candidate  .His  sudden departure from Fox News has ramped up speculation about his political future, would immediately bring to the 2016 contest a high ***profile from his TV work and goodwill with the GOP’s most socially conservative voters, but he would be dogged from the start by questions about his organizational and fundraising abilities.The movement in the GOP contrasts with the Democratic Party, whose ranks are rapidly coalescing around Hillary Rodham Clinton as their standard-bearer. Other potential Democratic candidates, such as former Virginia senator Jim Webb and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, have failed to gain much traction. Huckabee's move could be vary troubling , he has (2)>  "religious" motives that  back  2 months ago he was threatening to abandon the Republican Party if they did not stand up against the Courts (including the Supreme Court itself) for ruling state bans against same-sex marriages were unconstitutional. and it could further distance if he mixes religious motives in  ,and voters from voting Republican. Unfortunately both parties are putting together a disaster . The scary part is that the GOP people will kill each other off again and we may just see Hillary win, unless she is taken out by another clown like Obama in the process. Huckabee is obviously unsuited for the Presidency, since he seems to believe that his brand of right wing, religiously tinted conservatism will have any following outside the bible belt. - Considering the abysmal approval level of the Congress, which is majority Republican, he may do well with the religious right wing base, but the great majority of the American voters will never vote for him. If Huckabee runs, the hurdles he faced the last time out, namely geography and money, would still be there. Huckabee will need to demonstrate that he can build upon his eight 2008 primary and caucus victories, and win outside of the evangelical strongholds of Iowa and the rural South. Having regional appeal is one thing; simply being a regional candidate is another. Huckabee's  new book is also an uproar titled , God, Guns Grits and Gravy, is just as bad as Sarah Palin's Going Rouge . His new book doesn't get into many policy specifics; some of what Huckabee proposes he dubs "Redneck Remedies." Like his head-shaking at Miley, his political views are hardly surprising: Obama is bad. Same-sex marriage is a sin. Guns save lives. Government is intended to be as local as possible. The IRS is a criminal enterprise. Climate change is probably hot air.  The "Get Off My Lawn" chapter wraps up with Huckabee boldly asserting that "part of the solution is better citizens obeying the laws we already have so we don't have to pass new laws to further explain and expand the old ones." Good luck with that.The book's 242 pages long spares no topic  in his riffs on the corrosive effects of Hollywood culture, but he saves special scorn for hip-hop's most famous couple, Jay-Z and Beyonce. Huckabee compared the duo's 2013 Grammy Award performance to watching "foreplay." The book, which comes out later this month, deals with many other issues than marriage. One chapter titled "Bend Over and Take It Like a Prisoner!" addresses the security procedures practiced at U.S. airports.And Huckabee? He is about as right wing and evangelical as they come, but his style is soothing, not alarming. He has run a state. He can put more than two sentences together. But the fans of unfettered capitalism at the Club for Growth say that, as governor, Huckabee had a disturbing affinity for raising taxes and increasing government spending. Plus, Huckabee takes his Bible seriously and has a soft spot for the poor and disadvantaged. Billionaires might not like that.

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

*** Surely evangelicals could easily bankroll Huckabee's campaign; will they or will they wait for Adelson or Koch to do it for them? (1)> In 2008, after he no longer had any mathematical possibility of winning the Republican nomination, Huckabee colluded with John McCain's campaign and stayed in the race just to split the conservative vote which McCain could not win anyway, Thus Mitt Romney, who might have beaten Obama that year (and certainly could not have done any worse than McCain) lost votes, allowing McCain to secure the nomination.There was no reason for Huckabee to have done this, other than his vanity, his anti-Mormon bigotry, and to increase his name recognition and marketability before launching a TV show. In 2008 the Polls said otherwise , What some people forget about Huckabee's 2008 run was that he didn't just win Iowa; he also won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Tennessee and West Virginia. His eight wins, in fact, were not far behind second-place Mitt Romney's 11, and Huckabee won more than 20 percent of all votes cast, despite dropping out with more than a dozen states yet to vote. (2)> His motives are obvious since he appeared last October edition of “The 700 Club,” where he spoke with host Pat Robertson about how the country is witnessing “the trampling of civil rights” because the Obama administration “destroyed the basic constitutional foundation” of America.