The internal contradictions of Mike Huckabee

By R.K. Barry

When former Arkansas Governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee blurted out twice in the same radio interview that President Obama grew up in Kenya, implying that this helped to explain why the president’s worldview is supposedly different from most Americans, I immediately thought that something interesting was going on. It was not, however, the obvious point that Obama did not grow up in Kenya and, in fact, only visited there for the first time in his twenties.

No, anyone remotely well-informed knows where Obama grew up (Hawaii and Indonesia), and Mike Huckabee is generally speaking a fairly well-informed person. The question for me was why he would say such a thing.

His claim that he misspoke and meant to say Indonesia rather than Kenya makes no sense if we examine exactly what he said, which was:

But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

As is also well known, President Obama’s father abandoned the family early on, so that part of the statement is contrary to fact. But on the claim that Huckabee simply said Kenya when he meant to say Indonesia, it should be noted that the Mau Mau uprising took place in Kenya in the 1950s. In other words, Huckabee didn’t misspeak. He meant to say Kenya, and he said Kenya. He was spreading a blatant falsehood to pander to those on the right who continue to believe that Obama has been influenced by un-American ideas or that he was not even born in America.

Now hold that thought.

A short time later, Huckabee decided it would be good to take on the whole idea of single mothers by slamming Oscar winner Natalie Portman for, at least for moment, being in that category. In yet another radio interview, he stated:

People see a Natalie Portman who boasts, “We’re not married but we’re having these children and they’re doing just fine.” I think it gives a distorted image. It’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-wedlock children.

Huckabee then took some heat for his comments from those who think he should mind his own business and then more or less immediately backtracked by claiming that his comments about Natalie Portman’s pregnancy were distorted and taken out of context and that he was merely making a point about statistics, not a poke at the Oscar-winning actress’s pregnancy before marriage.

But just as in his retracted claim that Obama grew up in Kenya, I suspect that this is all bullshit. I am guessing that Mike Huckabee, should he choose to run for president, is busy sending up flairs to signal to hardcore conservatives everywhere that he is on their side. His efforts to distance himself from his own comments are, I believe, an equally cynical attempt to curry favour with more centrist swing voters who don’t have much of an appetite for birtherism or moralizing of the Christian right variety.

Huckabee knows the truth and that’s what makes all of this so unseemly. The challenge for any Republican presidential hopeful is going to be to try to square the circle: to be conservative enough to secure the nomination and centrist enough to win the general election. The former governor of Arkansas is hoping that, by speaking out of both sides of his mouth, enough voters will hear what they need to hear to believe that he is their guy.

Could it work? Stranger things have happened.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann’s Ghost.)