The Governor vs. “Talent On Loan From God”

Mike Huckabee is a pleasant enough guy with a preacher-man façade.  Cumulus Media Networks is sending him, unarmed, into the Roman Coliseum to be devoured by ravenous lions.

This Monday, the former Arkansas governor will launch a three-hour show that will play on about 200 stations nationwide in the same time slot as Rush Limbaugh. 

“In the supermarket, there’s an aisle for cereal, and there’s probably more than one box in the cereal section. Not everybody wants Cheerios. Some people want Frosted Flakes—though I’m not saying that I’m the Frosted Flakes, maybe that’s a terrible metaphor,” said Huckabee.

The slogan for the new show is “More conversation, less confrontation.”

Cumulus is hawking Huck’s gig as a “safe, non-dangerous alternative to Rush,” adding, “If you are looking for conservative content, we want you to consider our guy instead of theirs.”

I’ve got a newsflash for the Dickey Brothers and Cumulus:  Politics is not a playground, it’s a battlefield.  There will be blood.

The New York Times admits that Limbaugh has been the most powerful talk radio host in the United States for two decades. “Other news media personalities, like Bill O’Reilly, have tried to go up against Mr. Limbaugh and failed, but Mr. Huckabee has the advantage of his political credentials and Mr. Limbaugh’s own weakened position.”

Political credentials?  You’ve got to be kidding.

Maurice Clemmons was facing 95 years in prison for a lengthy list of crimes, but was pardoned by Huckabee over the objections of prosecutors and family members of his victims. 

Citing his young age when he committed those crimes as the reason he commuted his sentence, he showed up in Tacoma, Washington killing four police officers.  In effect, his pardoning of this criminal wound up being his “Willie Horton”.

His nickname, “Tax Hike Mike”, is not undeserved.  The Tax Foundation makes no bones about the fact that during his 10-and-a-half years as governor of Arkansas he “presided over $505 million worth of tax increases.  Sales taxes were raised.  So were gasoline taxes and the per capita tax burden on the state’s residents grew by 50 percent.”

On October 26, 2007, Pat Toomey (then-president and CEO of Club for Growth and now-senator from Pennsylvania) said of Huckabee:

“Huckabee makes no secret of his desire to turn the GOP leftward, calling himself a ‘different kind of Republican,’ adopting protectionist positions, and peppering his campaign speeches with the kind of class warfare rhetoric one expects to hear from John Edwards. No doubt, this is the reason that the liberal media is so smitten with him.” 

“Instead of talking about curtailing government spending, Huckabee refuses to endorse President Bush's veto of a vastly expanded S-CHIP. He is an unabashed fan of No Child Left Behind and an opponent of private school choice. Huckabee is also quickly becoming the labor unions' favorite Republican, recently gaining a union endorsement along with Hillary Clinton.”

“…the liberal media is so smitten with him.” [Emphasis mine]

Jeffrey Lord, writing for The American Spectator, opines:

“What do you think our far-left friends over at Media Matters think of all this? They, after all, have spent weeks now trying—and failing abjectly—to strip Rush Limbaugh from every one of his 600-plus stations in a phony, ginned-up hate campaign designed to intimidate Rush's sponsors.” 

“Media Matters loves Mike Huckabee! And the New York Times hasn't loved a ‘conservative’ with such fervor since it regularly lathered over the pre-2008 John McCain. Speaking of which, when will Cumulus sign RINO devotee Megan McCain?”

Rush has his warts too, but the blemishes on the charming preacher-man are too ugly to ignore.