Mike Huckabee: stuck in the past
- By Mitchell Blatt
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E-mail China.org.cn, January 13, 2015
The anti-abortion positions Huckabee advocates are also extremely unpopular. Both the "personhood" amendment Huckabee supported in Mississippi in 2011 that would have banned abortion and some contraceptives and the similar 2006 South Dakota law he supported were resoundingly defeated at the polls, with over 55 percent of the citizens in the respective states voting against them, and "personhood" amendments continue to fail in every state they are put on the ballot. Huckabee, though, in 2008 proposed a national amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban abortion.
We already know his platform loses. It's the Todd Akin platform. Akin lost the 2012 Missouri Senate election by a 15.5 point margin after adopting a position of banning abortion even in the case of rape. After Akin commented that "legitimate rape" rarely results in pregnancy, most of the national GOP figures denounced him and abandoned his campaign, but Huckabee was still there defending him.
Richard Murdock also lost the Senate election that year in the heavily Republican state of Indiana after he supported Akin's abortion position, and Ken Cuccinelli lost the Virginia gubernatorial election of 2013 for supporting "personhood" as well as a law banning oral or anal sex, a ban that was ruled unconstitutional in the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas. (Speaking of Lawrence v. Texas, Huckabee's campaign said in 2007 that he opposes the decision.)
After the Akin-meltdown cost the Republicans control of the Senate, the party reoriented itself in 2014 and ran more moderate candidates across the country and won the Senate. Corey Gardner won the highly-contested Colorado Senate election by reversing his previous support for "personhood." At the same time the "personhood" amendment on the ballot in Colorado failed by a 64.9-35.1 percent margin. It was the third straight time "personhood" has failed there.
If this column is starting to sound repetitive, it's because recent history has been repetitive. Will the Christian right ever learn? It doesn't take an expert to see that doing the same thing time after time will keep getting the same results.
Running Huckabee would be like bringing a horse to the Indy 500. It would be like trying to fly across the Atlantic in the Wright Brothers' glider. It would be like trying to post a Twitter message with a pen and paper. Huckabee should know that wouldn't work. He made a big announcement on Twitter before his farewell show telling people to tune in.
This is the same Mike Huckabee who railed against "smartphones" and "computer screens" on his Fox News show after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting left 26 at the school dead. It's the same Huckabee who cited Robert Putnam's 2000 book Bowling Alone, which argues that television has caused a decline in civic participation, as a major influence on his thinking.
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