Janet Huckabee Gives Insight on What makes Mike Tick

I thought this was a very good article. I read this a couple of days ago and I have been meaning to post it. It is by Slate and called The fascinating marriage of Mike and Janet Huckabee.

As the article indicates there were many that we surprised that she has not taken a more public role in the campaign.

There are some Catholic bloggers I respect that don't like Mike. It seems they are not sure what he is selling and it is all fake. I think this article shows where Mike's ideas come from.

Here is just a part:
For Huckabee's Republican critics, the unforgivable sin is not that he's wishy-washy on traditional marriage—oh, not true—but that he also wants to drag all kinds of other Christian arcana into the public square, with his relatively moderate stands on education and immigration and downright progressive, Jesus-y views on how we're to care for the least among us. And in this, his detractors on the right are correct: Fiscally, and in his attitude toward social funding and even criminal justice, Huckabee has a record any DLC Democrat would be proud of. (And Huckabee never speaks ill of Bill Clinton, either, perhaps realizing that the "next man from Hope" narrative would be diminished were he to do so.)

In his book From Hope to Higher Ground, Huckabee includes a whole chapter called "STOP the revenge-based criminal justice system." He writes about how racial inequities are built into the system, and he approvingly quotes one prison official who told him, "We lock up a lot of people that we are mad at rather than just the ones we are really afraid of," and another who "astutely observed we don't have a crime problem, we have a drug and alcohol problem."
So, when Janet Huckabee joked that she'd like to build a Habitat for Humanity house on the White House lawn—she's hammered nails for such homes in 20-some states already, and slept under bridges with homeless people once a year to bring awareness to their problems—Republicans in Arkansas were half-afraid she wasn't kidding.

Because back home, the Huckabees' empathy for the luckless is one thing that has never been in doubt: "Janet's very headstrong and, even more so than he, contemptuous of critics, and has a chip on her shoulder,'' says John Brummett, an Arkansas News Bureau columnist. "But if a tornado hits your house, one of the first people in your yard is probably going to be Janet Huckabee. And when Arkansas got evacuees from Katrina—and by all accounts Huckabee did masterfully—she decided, accurately, that these people were exhausted and the last thing they needed was to sit in line and be processed, when they could be processed on the bus." Then she got on the bus with some of them and pitched in on the paperwork.


In a way, such efforts are a natural extension of their 20 years in the ministry. "I know there are people who would be concerned about him having been in the ministry and think that's a little bit creepy,'' says Huckabee's sister Pat Harris, a seventh-grade teacher in Little Rock. "But having been in the ministry, he and Janet have also seen all kinds of things about life; his phone would ring in the middle of the night and up they'd go, to the hospital or the morgue or the jail. Because he was on TV, a lot of these calls were from people who weren't in his church and very often they weren't believers, but the rubber had met the road and they needed somebody."

The Huckabees' shared faith defines both of them, and their relationship. And it would be an understatement to say it influences their politics: Their faith makes their views on religion and government indistinguishable. "Those who believe God created humans have a different worldview from those who believe humans created God," Huckabee writes in Character Makes a Difference. "Politics are totally directed by worldview. That's why when people say, 'We ought to separate politics from religion,' I say to separate the two is absolutely impossible."

But the Huckabees also seem to relate to the have-nots because they know what it feels like to be looked down on. Class resentment runs through their comments and writings.

When Lt. Gov. Huckabee became Arkansas governor in 1996, after Jim Guy Tucker was had to resign after a fraud conviction, "Dozens of hate-filled letters were sent anonymously," Huckabee remembers, while "others, proudly signed, proclaimed that we lacked the 'class' to live in such a fine and stately home. My wife was viciously attacked for everything from the manner in which the azaleas were trimmed to the fact that we had made the governor's mansion smoke-free and removed alcoholic beverages. … One would have thought that we had turned off the water, put old cars on concrete blocks on the front lawn, hung laundry on the fence, and raised chickens and hogs in the backyard!" (They did famously move into a triple-wide trailer while the mansion was under renovation, and hung a sign on it that said, "My other home is the Governor's Mansion.") Huckabee also goes on at some length about how hurtful "snobby elitists" have been to his wife over the years: "

For her, one of the most difficult aspects of being Arkansas' first lady was the inevitable confrontation with some of the snobby elitists who had always been on the side of the culturally correct in Little Rock." On one of the rare occasions Janet has spoken out on the presidential campaign trail, she jokingly suggested it was only her faith that kept her from strangling some of them: "There's times you just want to wring somebody's neck, and only by the grace of God we don't."

It is a good article. I understand that she needless to say is woman of strong ideas. However I do think not having her in the public eye as a critical part of the camapaign team has been a mistake.

Good Read.

In fact the Author of this piece agrees:

In fact, in a country in which the Bushes were rewarded for acting down-home, and the Kerrys punished for being their windsurfing, polyglot selves, most of the criticism of Janet is so class-based, it would turn out to be great PR: She likes her pie, is middleweight boxing champ Jermain Taylor's biggest fan, and, with the help of her Baptist decorator, made a hash of the Arkansas governor's mansion, jettisoning draperies to let the light in and stowing antiques in favor of faux. She slams doors, packs heat, and, like most of us, will never be confused with Jackie Kennedy: "Janet is not White House material; I doubt she's learned which fork to use," says one of her Little Rock detractors, who was apolitical before Mrs. H. made him apoplectic. "She's such a big old horsy woman, she has no grace. I've seen her chew gum on television!"

So it's a shame she doesn't give more speeches and interviews, because what a lot of Americans would say to a person of such poor comportment and little breeding is: Come and sit here, by me.