So what’s up with Huckabee? I heard a Huckabee speech on NPR recently, and it came off as a populist message.
He talked about healthcare and creating a a system that covers more people and emphasizes prevention more than just intervention. (He blamed the fact health insurance is provided through employers and that for preventive medicine to become profitable for insureres you have to stay 8 years with them, but people change jobs (and thus insurance companies) before then so there’s no profit motive for one insurer to essentially lower costs for a competitor.)
He talked about energy independence as a national security imperative.
It was a positive message. Nothing divisive. Sure, he’s a conservative and so there would be policy differences, but I got the impression that we agreed with on the problems and the goals.
Of course he supports a national sales tax that is just a backdoor way of eliminating taxes on corporations, cutting taxes on the wealthy, and imposing a regressive income tax. That’s bullshit. He also said he didn’t believe in evolution, which makes my skin crawl, but even his answer that boiled down to “I can’t believe in something that eliminates god” struck me as a widespread belief. He just never bothered to try to shoe-horn evolution into religion, like a lot of people that want to avoid the issue.
So the knocks against him for me is “supports crackpot tax policy, that won’t happen” and “fear of him trying to ‘teach the controversy’ over evolution.”
The talking heads are making this big deal that he represents the born-agains usurping the leadership of the gop from the corporatists if he gets the nomination, but is that true? Sure he’s not the corporatists’ candidate, but he doesn’t strike me as Falwell or Dobson either.
So what am I missing?