Mike Huckabee

In Soviet of Washington, votes cast you

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

Time was, conservatives called the state north of Oregon "the Soviet of Washington" based on its left-wing history. These days, we have Mike Huckabee comparing the state GOP's handling of their caucus to the USSR's election practices -- and actually kind of having a point.

To recap, during Huckabee's strong run over the weekend, he and John McCain were running neck and neck in Washington. Then, Huckabee pulled ahead. From there:

* The votes began being counted veeeeeeery sloooooooowly.

* State GOP chair Luke Esser abruptly called the race for McCain, despite the fact that McCain was leading by just a few hundred votes with 87 percent of the precincts reporting. Huckabee's supporters were furious.

* Responding to criticism, state GOP chair Esser said the following day that they were "trying" to get as "close as we can to 100 percent" of the vote counted. A paragon of democratic principle, that one.

* Then, observers began saying that the race probably didn't even meet caucus standards, and was more like a straw poll -- one reason Huckabee's lawyers got involved.

* The spin coming out was that Esser never meant to call the race, just to give "his analysis" (despite the strongly worded press release that contradicts that notion).

* Finally, with almost 100 percent of the votes counted (and substantial irregularities reported), McCain appears -- shockingly -- to have won the race. Huckabee's not so sure, and still plans to contest the election.

Late update: Vladimir Putin is being called in as an independent election observer. "Seems fair to me," he is reported to have said before arriving in Washington state.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at February 12, 2008 10:11 AM | Comments (0)

 

Huck fights on, sends lawyers to Washington

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

Just when you thought it was over, Mike Huckabee not only scores a series of wins, but takes the gloves off in the closely-contested Washington caucuses.

Washington State GOP chair Luke Esser halted the ballot count with 87 percent reporting and McCain with a razor-thin lead. In a tersely worded statement, Huckabee decried this decision and shipped lawyers to the Pacific Northwest to contest matters.

Calling the count "dubious" and citing numerous "irregularities," Huckabee vowed to soldier on. This is curious, because many assumed that Huck had packed it in and was essentially running for the vice presidential nomination at this point. Mathematically, he's still in it, but the likelihood of the former Arkansas governor actually securing the nomination at this point are very slim. Seems like an odd decision on his part.

On the other hand, the Washington State GOP decision is worse than odd. It's disenfranchisement, pure and simple. The comments on Team Huckabee's official blog show that his supporters are incensed. Also, some are a little unhinged. (The "McCain falsified his war record" kooks are out, along with some other pretty gross anti-McCain comments). But in this case, they certainly have a right to be upset about a race that was inexplicably called too soon -- not by the media, but by the party itself.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at February 10, 2008 4:23 PM | Comments (2)

 

Huckaboom

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee has been the forgotten man in recent days. Many media reports about the GOP contest didn't even mention the former Arkansas governor. It was repeatedly cast as a contest between Romney and McCain. Yet early projections show Huckabee winning at least three states today: Alabama, Arkansas, and West Virginia. Georgia, Oklahoma, Missouri and Tennessee also look strong for him.

Posted by Paul Demko at February 5, 2008 8:08 PM | Comments (1)

 

Huckabee wins W.Va. with help from McCain, Paul UPDATE

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee has won West Virginia, beating Mitt Romney 52% to 47%. But perhaps more interesting is that John McCain may have had more of a hand in the victory than his 1% vote tally might suggest.

Here's Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic:

After the first round of balloting in West Virginia, Mitt Romney was solidly in the lead with 41% of the votes, followed by Mike Huckabee with 33% and John McCain with 16%.

Since 50% is needed to win all 18 delegates, a second balloting is underway.

But sources say that representatives for John McCain called many of his reps in WV and asked them to vote for Huckabee...in order to thwart Romney on the second ballot.

And now comes word from local TV station WSAZ that Huckabee also picked up support from Ron Paul's West Virginia supporters by pledging to give him three national delegates in return.

UPDATE: The Hill has more. Romney is accusing McCain and Huckabee of a shady "backroom deal."

“Unfortunately, this is what Senator McCain’s inside Washington ways look like: he cut a backroom deal with the tax-and-spend candidate he thought could best stop Governor Romney’s campaign of conservative change,” Beth Myers, Romney’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

I don't see anything shady about this. In fact, it looks a lot like a brokered convention.

/Hat tip: DailyKos

Posted by Kevin Hoffman at February 5, 2008 3:25 PM | Comments (1)

 

Perils of the Huck-a-boom

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

The Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler has an excellent story today detailing the growing pains of the post-Iowa Huckabee campaign. The piece deftly highlights the charms of his populist campaign, while also providing strong evidence for why he is highly unlikely to ultimately be the GOP nominee. Huckabee's folksy, snuff-using campaign manager, Chip Saltsman, delivers most of the yucks. Here's an anecdote about the campaign's Michigan misadventures:

It was barely 24 hours after the New Hampshire polls closed, but Michigan was less than a week away. The campaign was focused on South Carolina and had almost no infrastructure in Michigan. Polls showed Mr. Huckabee had a shot there, so Mr. Saltsman decided to make an effort.

He sent Shane Henry, a 28-year-old Arkansas lawyer who had helped get Mr. Huckabee on state ballots. Mr. Henry, whose father-in-law is close to Mr. Huckabee, sold some property in September, making enough to forgo a paycheck for a while. He signed on as a volunteer, and calls the timing of his windfall "a God thing."

He was hardly the ideal organizer. Asked what Mr. Henry knew about Michigan, Mr. Saltsman says he knew where it was. Mr. Henry, asked about his experience in organizing events, says, "I was student-body president at my university."

But read the whole damn thing.

Posted by Paul Demko at January 17, 2008 1:06 PM | Comments (0)

 

Note to Huck: Homosexuality is not akin to bestiality

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

What is with conservatives and bestiality? Why do they like to talk about it so much? Specifically, why do prominent right-wing politicians keep trying to put gay people in the same category as Manimal lovers?

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was the prominent example of such, though not nearly the first. The latest: Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

Huck has stepped in the same goo, equating homosexuality with polygamy, pedophilia and marrying an animal. Quoth The Huckster in an interview with BeliefNet:

Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal.

Enough already with this tar-gays-with-the-bestiality-brush bit. Huckabee's ramblings, like those of his ilk, make you wonder if it's just a talking point or if thre's some kind of projection going on here.

This hearkens back to a similar interview with Rick Santorum, forever earning himself the label "Senator Man-on-Dog." Little Ricky dropped the same kind of rhetoric, but a bit more fervent and salty. The ensuing exchange between an Associated Press reporter and Santorum may be my favorite two lines of political dialogue ever:

AP: I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out.

SANTORUM: And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately.

Maybe that's where you're at, Rico, and maybe it's where Huck's at, but leave the rest of us -- the ones who think gay folks ought to have equal rights under the law -- out of it.

So, where do you go from here, Huckster? Do you backpedal from these ill-advised remarks? Or do you scramble further down the well-trod path of lunacy, until we're forced to keep making stickers like this?

Note to Huck: You can love your pet -- just don't love your pet. Wakaru?

Posted by Jeff Shaw at January 17, 2008 11:22 AM | Comments (1)

 

Vote Huck!

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

The world, as Annie Savoy noted in Bull Durham, is made for those not cursed with self-awareness. So it is with the young men who deliver this clever, if oddly-chosen, parody of the Beatles' "Help!". It's been altered to endorse Mike Huckabee.

Pretty catchy, no doubt about it. That spinning sound you hear is John Lennon, rotating in his grave.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at January 16, 2008 1:38 PM | Comments (3)

 

Huckabee and the "Colbert Bump"

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

Perhaps you've heard of the "Colbert Bump"? Mike Huckabee recently appeared on Stephen Colbert's Comedy Central show and attributed his surprising success in Iowa to the phenomenon. Let's go to the tape ... after the jump.

Back when Huckabee was garnering a paltry 1 percent in national polls, he appeared on the Colbert Report. The titular host noted that the Huckster was trailing, "Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, and six guys named Thompson" but announced, "Tonight that all changes because he's getting the Colbert Bump!"

Huckabee then proceeded to prattle on about "authenticity," referring to Colbert as an "authentic conservative" (irony alert!), then jokingly invited Colbert to be his running mate. But while Huckabee attempted to refer to a campaign bumper sticker, he instead made a Freudian slip (twice!) and said, "The bumper stripper reads Huckabee/Colbert: The Winning Ticket in '08." Check the video:

Turns out the "Colbert Bump" was no joke, because Huckabee caught fire and surged in the polls, pulling off a win in Iowa that would previously have been unthinkable. So Huckabee came back to his sugar daddy.

"The only reason that I'm the frontrunner now is because of the Colbert Bump," Huckabee says, before conceeding that otherwise he'd be somewhere serving, "Huckaburgers."

More bon mots:

Colbert: "Do we both still feel that evolution is a farce?
Huckabee: "It's all a farce." (hyuk-hyuk, I don't believe in science!)

Colbert: "How about outsourcing jobs?"
Huckabee: "As long as it isn't mine." (hyuk-hyuk, people are unemployed because of NAFTA).

Colbert: "Is it true that you do not support building a pneumatic tube to fire Mexicans back to Guadalajara?"
Huckabee: "No, I don't support that. I'm not quite that harsh." (hyuk-hyuk, I lied to the leader of the Minutemen.)

Colbert concludes with this advice for his running mate: "Remember: Stay a Huckabee. Not a Huckawas."

Posted by Kevin Hoffman at January 15, 2008 9:29 PM | Comments (3)

 

Mike Huckabee has a posse

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

Seeing Chuck Norris in Mike Huckabee's posse during his Iowa victory speech reminded me of Shepard Fairey's ubiquitous Obey Giant stickers. So I recruited City Pages Associate Art Director Mike Kooiman to design a spoof. I think you'll agree that he nailed it:

As with our image of Huckabee morphing into Nixon, feel free to download it, send it to friends, put it on your web page, etc. Just please provide a link back to this post. Thanks!

PS It would really make my day if I saw one of these out on the streets of St. Paul during the RNC convention. Anybody want to print up some stickers?

Posted by Kevin Hoffman at January 8, 2008 4:53 PM | Comments (1)

 

Huckabee morphing into Nixon

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

One of my favorite passages from Matt Snyders's cover story this week was his visceral description of the resemblance between Mike Huckabee and Richard Nixon:

If you took Richard Nixon circa 1973, sheared his jowls with a meat cleaver, and filed 1.3 centimeters off the tip of his nose with a synthetic grindstone, you'd be left staring at a creature physically identical to Huckabee.

Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, City Pages Associate Art Director Mike Kooiman has brought the concept to life with this gif:

Feel free to download it, send it to friends, put it on your web page, etc. Just please provide a link back to this post. Thanks!

Posted by Jeff Shaw at January 8, 2008 3:27 PM | Comments (1)

 

Huckabee: I'll deport their babies! UPDATED WITH DENIAL

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

In this week's cover story, Matt Snyders describes the disappointment of a questioner at a Fred Thompson rally upon learning that Fred is too lazy to deport Hispanic babies. To wit:

"I appreciate your tough stance against illegal immigrants. But what about the babies? Those that are born here? Are there policies you could make to deport them?"

Thompson shuffled his feet and deftly answered, "Well, I don't believe the president can change that with the stroke of a pen. I believe the courts have interpreted that as falling under the 14th amendment."

The woman wilted ever so slight in her folding chair, visible disappointed that her candidate wasn't willing to deport American babies for the crime of being born Hispanic.

Cheer up, xenophobes! Mike Huckabee has your back after the jump!

An article in today's Washington Times says that Huckabee is vowing to pass an amendment to the Constitution to deny birthright citizenship:

Mike Huckabee wants to amend the Constitution to prevent children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens from automatically becoming American citizens, according to his top immigration surrogate — a radical step no other major presidential candidate has embraced.

Mr. Huckabee, who won last week's Republican Iowa caucuses, promised Minuteman Project founder James Gilchrist that he would force a test case to the Supreme Court to challenge birthright citizenship, and would push Congress to pass a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to remove any doubt.

This is in stark contrast to Huckabee's policies while serving as Arkansas governor. Buried on the second page of the Washington Times article, after a lot of blather about a related but different issue, there's this:

Mr. Huckabee has defended his policies on illegal aliens while he was Arkansas governor. He pressed for illegal aliens to gain college tuition benefits, complained about federal immigration raids in his state and declined to have state police enforce immigration laws, although the state legislature gave him the authority to do so.

This is obviously the ghost of Tom Tancredo, who may have dropped out of the race, but succeeded in injecting immigration as a major issue in this campaign. As our sister paper wrote on its Demver convention blog after Tancredo dropped out in December:

At the CNN debate earlier this month, Tancredo noted that on the immigration front, the other candidates Republicans were beginning to "out-Tancredo Tancredo."

This might also be an attempt by the Huckster to outflank John McCain, who is expected to have a good showing in New Hampshire but is too soft on immigration for the base.

UPDATE: Mike Huckabee is denying the claims made in the Washington Times:

News Release: Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee statement on Constitutional Amendment regarding citizenship birthright
January 08, 2008

LITTLE ROCK, AR -- Former Arkansas Governor and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has issued the following comment in response to a Washington Times article reporting he would amend the Constitution in connection to children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens:

"I do not support an amendment to the Constitution that would prevent children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens from automatically becoming American citizens. I have no intention of supporting a constitutional amendment to deny birthright citizenship."

Posted by Kevin Hoffman at January 8, 2008 2:28 PM | Comments (9)

 

Huckaboom

Filed under: Mike Huckabee

Even if Mike Huckabee gets drubbed in today's New Hampshire primary, it's increasingly clear that the former Arkansas governor's victory in Iowa is providing a massive boost. The most recent SurveyUSA numbers in South Carolina show Huckabee with a commanding 17 point lead (Huckabee, 36; Romney, 19; McCain 17). And yesterday's announcement that Minnesota GOP chair Ron Carey will head up the folksy Baptist preacher's campaign in the state is another shot in the arm. The endorsement should prove a nice counterbalance to Gov. Pawlenty's backing of McCain.

Posted by Paul Demko at January 8, 2008 12:39 PM | Comments (0)