Update On Huckabee And Iowa

In a previous post I had mentioned that Mike Huckabee's poll numbers had soared soon after Mitt Romney's speech on religion. It seemed to me that Iowa evangelicals had made their decision to caucus with Huckabee, a former successful evangelical preacher, at about the same time as Romney's speech. Huckabee now leads Romney in Iowa polling by double digits.

But there's more to the story…..

A poll published this month in Newsweek magazine showed that 63% of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers considered a candidate's views on illegal immigration "very important."

…

The biggest about-face has come from Huckabee, long admired by the immigrant rights movement for his policies as governor of Arkansas. Now, however, he is toeing the hardest anti-illegal-immigration line of any top-tier candidate, with a new "secure the borders" television ad in Iowa and a plan, announced last week, to require all 12 million people here illegally to leave the country within four months or risk serious punishment. Link

Now I realize and fully accept that what we have been witnessing in Giuliani, Romney, and Huckabee can't be described as flip-flopping. Flip-flopping, as everyone knows, is only what Democratic candidates do, not Republicans. So Mike Huckabee didn't flip-flop and change his mind on immigration, oh no, that can't be it, because Huckabee is a Republican.

I think Mike Huckabee, because he can't be a flip-flopper, is simply feeling the pain for the first time of all those Iowa evangelical types. Before he ran for president, Huckabee didn't really feel the pain of those Iowans, now he does and he wants to do something about it.

What is that pain? It's the pain of frustration one feels when things aren't going the way you would like them to go. For Iowa Republicans facing a primary and general election with party poll numbers in the basement, that pain is acute. That frustrating pain has been caused out there in Iowa by 7 long years of Bushism in America. Traditional Republican lies policies, like a strong defense, fiscal conservancy, and small government are smoldering in the ash heap of Bush/Cheney Republicanism, leaving a void to be filled. Filling that void is what Huckabee is doing with his newfound immigration position.

What platform plank can be moved into the default position when the other GOP planks have rotted so badly? Intolerance. Republicans already hate Muslims and gays, women and blacks are still hated but protected by law…..so Latino immigrants, documented and un, have become the lightning rod of those Iowan's pain. Mike Huckabee, once not as abrasive towards undocumenteds, is now taking up the painful cross of Iowa evangelicals, the cross of intolerance, and bearing it himself in the high hopes of healing his hillbilly campaign. As the new poll numbers demonstrate…..intolerance works as a pain reliever.

Like a Jewish High Priest of old symbolically taking all the sins of Israel once a year on the Day of Atonement and placing those sins onto the head of a goat then released into the wilderness, Mike Huckabee has taken the Iowa caucus goers pain upon his campaign, the pain of a diseased and terminally ill political party doomed to minority status because of their Dear and Revered Leader's rogue regime, and now Huckabee is going to place all that pain, and there's quite a lot of it, all onto the heads of undocumented Latinos.

Mike Huckabee isn't being considered a flip-flopper by Iowa evangelicals just because he's changed his mind about undocumented Latinos, heavens no. If a Democrat changed his or her mind on immigration, then yeah, that would be flip-flopping.

Bashing and threatening undocumented Latinos now when he didn't do it previously shouldn't be called flip-flopping by Mike Huckabee.

Instead, it should be called Evangelical pain management.