Once upon a time former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was considered a serious presidential candidate with a long train of admirers on both the left and the right; as Jon Stewart took pains to note whenever Huckabee stopped by his show (which was frequently), Huckabee was the kind of guy you could agree with without being disagreeable. You might even consider voting for him for uncle.
But if you looked past the bass guitar and the PG-but-still-half-decent sense of humor, there was another side of Huckabee that’s easy to forget about: He’s really, really conservative. And that explains why, two weeks ago, he traveled to Jackson, Mississippi to raise money for the Yes on 26 campaign, in support of the Mississippi Personhood amendment, a referendum on the November ballot that would ban abortions in the state. All abortions. Even in cases of rape or incest. And that’s by design: the amendment’s sponsors barnstormed the state this spring on something called the “Conceived in Rape Tour,” designed to show Mississippians that being forced to carry a forced pregnancy to term is actually quite rewarding.
Huckabee’s message at the Yes on 26 fundraiser was simple:Â Give early and give often:
“I do not assume that you full comprehend the battle that you are going to face over the next couple of months in this fight for Amendment 26,” Huckabee said. “You have no idea how many millions of dollars are likely to be poured into your state. And it’s not stimulus money and economic development and job creation. It is hard-core political money that is designed to preserve the abortion industry, which is a multi-million-dollar industry specifically designed in order to terminate life and make people rich. Let’s not kid ourselves. This is not about elevating women, this is about elevating wealth on behalf of those who profit from the sale of death.”
You could make a good case that an amendment that would force women who have been raped to have the rapist’s baby does not really elevate women, nor does banning certain forms of contraception like the morning-after pill (which supporters of the amendment call a “human pesticide”). Moreover, as I noted in my piece today, Mississippi only has one abortion clinic in the entire state, so there’s not much of an abortion “industry” to speak of.
The larger takeway here, at least as far as Huckabee is concerned, is that this side of him has always been there. When he ran for president in 2008, reporters tended to focus on the underdog narrative and look past some of his wilder affiliations and controversial views. Whether that would have continued in 2012 is unknowable, but now it’s all out in the open.
