Huckabee Could be a Uniter

Call me a disloyal Democrat. But tonight I realized Mike Huckabee is again the figure he represented in Arkansas in the mid to late 1990s- a unifying figure in a deeply divided nation. Secular progressives (which include myself) tend to live along the coasts or in the Chicagoland area. But for the rest of America, Mike Huckabee can bring the same sort of healing he brought Arkansas racked by Whitewater and the indictment and conviction of Governor Jim Guy Tucker. Call Huckabee the anti-Clinton. The other man from Hope was always able to work with the Democratic dominated legislature and unlike so many Republicans elected statewide in Arkansas he was actually re-elected in what to this day remains on the state level on of the most Democratic states in the nation.

What Huckabee brings is a religious fundamentalism mixed with economic populism. This sort of thing plays well in the "Red States" and also in pockets of suburbia. Despite the best efforts of media elites and the Republican Party establishment to margainalize him, Huckabee prevailed in Iowa and has to be considered by anyone truly objective and versed in recent American political history a potential President.