Huckabee: Down with blimps!
In many ways, it was a classic Mike Huckabee maneuver.
Ninety minutes into the debate, the former Arkansas governor, who had barely gotten in a word in all night, brought up the military surveillance blimp that came untethered from an Army installation in Maryland on Wednesday afternoon and floated into Pennsylvania, becoming a Twitter sensation along the way.
“If you saw that blimp that got cut loose from Maryland today, it was a perfect example of government,” Huckabee said. “I mean, what we had was something the government made, basically a bag of gas that cut loose, destroyed everything in its path, left thousands of people without power, but they couldn’t get rid of it because we had too much money invested, so we had to keep it.”
“That is our government today,” Huckabee declared, as his opponents laughed. “We saw it in the blimp.”
Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, has always had the talent of finding the perfect sound bite — one that would at least land him in a highlights reel, even if he got less screen time than his political opponents.
Eight years ago, that same folksy, down-to-earth speaking style made Huckabee the sleeper candidate in the race for the Republican nomination. Ultimately, he came from behind and, despite having spent almost no money, trounced Mitt Romney in Iowa and held on to finish in second place behind John McCain in the nomination race.
But in his second White House bid, Huckabee has struggled to have that same kind of breakout moment. Less than 100 days out from the caucuses in Iowa, a state that is make or break for him, he’s struggled to gain traction in field crowded with candidates competing for social conservatives — the voters who helped him win that state in 2008.
That has prompted Huckabee to be more outspoken about his views on issues like abortion and religious liberty than he was eight years ago. But at Wednesday’s debate, there were flashes of the old Huckabee, as he used his rare moments on the stage to speak passionately about entitlement reform — an issue that has barely come up in the campaign — and curbing the federal deficit.
“I do not want to walk my five grandkids through the charred remains of a once-great country,” he said, citing the “trillions” in federal debt.
It was unquestionably a dramatic statement — but one that plays to a key constituency in the GOP electorate, especially in Iowa: older voters, who have expressed the same kind of fears about the legacy they are leaving to future generations.
