Sunday, February 10, 2008

Our guy doesn't need teleprompters

"This country was built on the impossible"

When a conservative's a "radical"

New York Times:
Mike Huckabee signed a no-new-taxes pledge and campaigned on a (borderline-crackpot) tax plan to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and institute a national sales tax. Yet he found himself caricatured as a “Christian socialist” because he had raised gas taxes and cigarette taxes while governor of Arkansas. Merely acknowledging that some corporate chief executives might be overpaid and some working-class voters might be struggling was enough to get him dismissed by George Will as a “radical” who had supposedly repudiated “free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America’s corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity.”

The conservative critics of Mr. McCain and Mr. Huckabee weren’t wrong on every issue. But in their zeal to read both candidates out of the conservative movement, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, the movement’s leaders raised a standard of ideological purity that not even Ronald Reagan could have lived up to.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Huckabee electrifies CPAC crowd

Fox News reports that Huck electrified the CPAC crowd:
If the loud audience reaction is an accurate indicator, then yes, Huckabee delivered today.

Hitting his mark, he emphasized the issues that resonated well with the several hundred cheering conservatives in the room:

Pro-traditional marriage, pro-life stance, border security, all Republican platform benchmarks, and with Huckabee’s argument for each, the audience roared with approval,and regular standing ovations.

Huckabee also took the opportunity to say that, despite McCain’s colossal lead in delegates, he had no plans to bow out.

“I know the pundits, and I know what they say, that the math doesn’t work out.Folks,I didn’t major in math,I majored in miracles, and I believe in those,” Huckabee said to cheers. “Am I quitting? Let’s get that settled right now. No, I’m not.” The crowd waved signs, and chanted: We like Mike… We like Mike.

Huckabee then concluded with a story from a supporter from Kentucky who had recently lost her house in the tornadoes that ravaged the South on Tuesday.

“Despite damage to her home there was one thing that was pretty remarkable,she had a Mike Huckabee yard sign..when the tornado had gone through,standing pristine, without a hint of damage, or even meaning,was that yard sign.”Huckabee continued.”Across America, everywhere there is still a vote to be cast, I am still standing.”