From the last Morning Jolt of the week . . .
The Sad End to Mike Huckabee’s Campaign
This morning former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, winner of the 2008 Republican Iowa caucus, is at 3 percent in Iowa, according to the RealClearPolitics average. No poll has had him in double digits since June. We don’t know how he’ll finish on caucus night February 1, but the outlook is not good.
That must be deeply frustrating and humbling. Defeat and disappointment are inevitable parts of life, but to devote years of your life to a goal and not merely fail to succeed, but do so much worse than in a previous effort, must sting.
Apparently, it also makes Huckabee want to lash out:
Mike Huckabee said in an interview on Wednesday that evangelical groups won’t support his presidential campaign out of fear they would no longer be able to fundraise if Christian policies were to actually be put in place.
In an interview with Fox News pundit Todd Starnes on his podcast, the former governor of Arkansas was asked if he felt betrayed by evangelical leaders and organizations that have gravitated towards Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.
“Well, certainly a sense of disappointment, and yet I do understand because, as I’ve often said, ‘I don’t go to them, I come from them,’ but because of that I do understand them,” Huckabee said. “A lot of them, quite frankly, I think they’re scared to death that if a guy like me got elected, I would actually do what I said I would do, and that is, I would focus on the personhood of every individual. We would abolish abortion based on the Fifth and 14th Amendment. We would ignore the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision.”
Huckabee said that, as a result of his presidency, evangelical organizations would no longer be able to galvanize their supporters and fundraise.
“A lot of these organizations wouldn’t have the ability to do urgent fundraising because if we slay the dragon, what dragon do they continue to fight? And so, for many of them, it could be a real detriment to their organization’s abilities to gin up their supporters and raise the contributions, and I know that sounds cynical but, Todd, it’s just, it is what it is,” Huckabee said.
This is like watching that team that’s been eliminated in the playoffs get into fights with the other team in the last game of the season.
Huckabee is a terrific, warm television host . . . and a sharp-elbowed grudge-carrier in politics, a point I made almost exactly one year ago. When Huckabee feels he’s been wronged, he holds nothing back; he compared Pat Toomey and the Club for Growth to “suicide bombers” and Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan.
I’ve had my gripes with him in the past — claiming a theology degree he doesn’t have, odes to the simple life and “flyover country” written from his beachfront property in Florida, his insulin-product ad where he dismisses prescription drugs as ineffective and denounces the greed of “big Pharma,” his sense that part of the job of the president is to grade and evaluate the fashion choices of Beyoncé and Jay-Z . . . but he was, at one point, the most charismatic, funniest, and arguably one of the most influential pro-life evangelical voices in America. And now he’s denouncing past allies because they prefer another candidate.