The Huckabee Biblical Agenda

Sometimes Mike Huckabee will come out and say something that just scares the fuck out of you.

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

This is a guy who's telling you that the Bible will be his Constitution. People tell you who they are. And this is why young evangelicals are flocking to him, as opposed to the evangelical leadership which is really more concerned with keeping power than anything the living God has to say. Huckabee represents a movement to quite literally take back the nation for Christ. I wonder, however, if he missed the memo on the commandment that says "Thou shalt not bear false witness":

I got a call from Huck's "independent" push pollers [Friday night]. It was a robo-call with a script that was micro-targeted for my Democratic union household. The robo-voice, which asked "poll" questions and left me time to answer, was an African-American male voice. Wanted to know if I was aware that "there is no real choice in the Michigan Democratic primary this year" and encouraged me to vote in the Repub primary instead.

Also asked if I was aware that the Machinists Union had endorsed Huckabee "for the first time in history..." (I assume by tonite they will add the Painters, too.) And if I knew that Huckabee was a fighter for working families, etc.

At the end, the robo-voice said the poll "was not affiliated with or authorized by any candidate or committee," but all the "questions" were designed to communicate positive information about the Huckster.

It's a classic ploy for these types of calls to play on ethnic and racial stereotypes -- though in this instance, the pollsters seem to have chosen their voice with the idea that a typically African-American male voice would appeal to Democrats. (When I asked Common Sense Issues' executive director Rick Davis whether it was accurate to characterize the voice in these calls as "an African-American male voice," he said "it could be.") Former dirty trickster Allen Raymond writes in his book How to Rig An Election that he had an array of actors available to portray a range of stereotypes, including "angry black man," which was deployed to frighten middle-class whites.

Huck's boys even called Republican Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, which was probably a bad idea.

I'm sure the Christian leader can reconcile dishonest push polling and robocalling in some way. Maybe Jesus worked phone banks!