Mike Huckabee has to do something extreme to differentiate himself from his opponent John McCain in South Carolina at this point. With the primary tomorrow, the two remain neck and neck (well, McCain doesn’t really have a neck, so maybe it’s neck and scar?). So Huckabee has taken a strategy that may work well in South Carolina but will have people scratching their heads in many other places in the country. Ever the populist, he’s come out in favor of one of America’s oldest underdogs: the right to fly the Confederate flag. Yesterday, in Myrtle Beach, he told a crowd of South Carolinians: “You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag.” Until 2000 when it was removed after political pressure, the pennant was still flying at the South Carolina State House. “If somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole,” Huckabee finished. Ha-ha! He’d ram it up their
asses! Oh, wait. That image in and of itself is a little offensive, even without the whole racial problem the flag represents. Click above to hear a pro-Huckabee ad that is running in the state right now, sponsored by the “Americans for the Preservation of American Culture,” a group that claims it is unaffiliated with the candidate. McCain, who in the past has called the flag a racist symbol, is painted as an anti-hero. As we discussed
this morning, this all may show how well Huckabee knows his base, but it also kind of shows how poorly he knows everybody
else.
Huckabee Embraces Confederate Flag To Woo White Evangelicals [HuffPo]
Earlier: Huckabee Is Inside Our Heads, Vice Versa
