Now here’s something I never thought I would say.
“Oh please, please, prove in 2008 that the GOP is nothing more than a regional party for Southern racist bigot flat-earther fundie nutjobs and nominate Da Huckster. Pleeeeeease.”
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has shot to the top of a new poll in South Carolina, leading Republican presidential candidates in the key Southern state.
Huckabee garnered 24 percent in the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, conducted by phone between Sunday and Wednesday. The survey was released Friday.
When the same poll was conducted in July, Huckabee was in the lower tier, with 3 percent of support from registered GOP voters.
I love it. The guy pretty much represents everything wrong with the GOP as a whole today, and he’s the one the 33 percenters are flocking to in droves. He’ll send all the brown people back to Mexico. He’ll build a giant statue of Jesus on the White House lawn with Savior-tronic action! He’ll destroy the damned heathen non-Christian secular liberal menace with the fireballs of righteousness from his own colon! Praise the Lord and pass the caucus votes!
The survey suggested that Huckabee’s personality was among his strengths. In particular, he tops the list when likely GOP voters are asked to name the candidate who is most believable. The South Carolina poll showed Huckabee rocketing ahead of his GOP rivals, including the former front-runner in the state, ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani, who led the July poll with 30 percent, dropped to a tie for third with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, both at 16 percent. Romney’s showing was a big improvement over his 6 percent standing in the previous survey.
I can’t get enough of this. The guy who says that evolution is a crock and removed it from textbooks in his state when Governor, thinks AIDS patients should be quarantined, thinks homosexuality is an immoral sin, wants to force rape victims to bear children of those rapes, and wants to deport 12 million folks out of the country and then let the immigration system process them at the speed of a couple hundred a year, is the most believable Presidential political candidate to these people. There is no conceivable way this guy can win a general election. The backlash against a man who has all of Bush’s worst qualities, only more of them, would be devastating come November of next year.
And yet the Republican Party is going to end up nominating him for the Presidency at this rate. They really are. What happens if he really does win in a landslide in Iowa, SC, and plays well enough in New Hampshire? What happens if two months from now, the second wave of primaries has this guy basically wrapping everything up despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Club for Growth wing of the GOP?
What happens when the rest of the country…the NON GOP voters…take a look at this guy and break out into guffaws and tears?
More importantly, if it’s clear Huckabee’s the front runner in late January or so, how is that going to affect the Democrats (knowing that the GOP has basically no chance of winning if he’s nominated?) I mean let’s face it, if Hillary’s unelectable in a general election, Huckabee’s a dead man by comparison. Any other candidate it just becomes a matter of the magnitude of the landslide, so how will THAT shake out?
How will the wingnuts react? They despise the guy. Malkinvania, Cowardly Lion, Corndog Man, Cap’n Crunch, they all despise the man even more than most of us do here in BooLand. They know that if he’s nominated, the GOP is fucked for a generation.
Given the lip service they pay to the lofty ideals of the Great Saint Reagan, you’d think they’d love him. They say they aren’t convinced he’s the right man “fiscally” for the job (which actually, if Huckster does have a single redeeming quality, it’s that he actually sees something morally wrong with outrageous CEO pay, health care costs and company profits.)
But everything else makes him the perfect candidate for the early 19th century. They should be lapping it up. Will they bury the hatchet with him should he be the nominee, or will they bury him, period? Who would the guy pick for a VP?
What happens when the GOP basically gets exactly the candidate it deserves to have?
We may very well find out.
