Mike Huckabee: ‘Nobody wants to be poor. That’s a stupid, foolish thing — mean thing — to say’
DES MOINES, Iowa — Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has not been a major presence in the Republican presidential primary race this year, eclipsed in the news by fresher faces and louder voices.
But at the Fox News-Google GOP debate here, held in a multifaceted event complex that was also playing host to the annual Iowa Pork Congress, Huckabee served up a reminder of why he surprised everyone in 2008 and won the caucuses: a mixture of staunch conservatism on social issues and empathetic language on economic ones.
Discussing a story of a woman who was struggling to make ends meet on $10,000 a year, Huckabee launched into a short speech on poverty that began with the expected conservative criticism of government programs, and then took a turn into a defense of the moral worth and dignity of poor people.
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“Do you know what our poverty programs do to people? They keep them in poverty,” Huckabee said. “They keep them in poverty because we have these arbitrary thresholds that mean that if you go to work, you lose all the benefits for your kids, Medicaid, WIC, Section 8 housing, food stamps, and then your kids go hungry. I know a little about poverty. My sister is here tonight. Now both of us could tell you we did not grow up rich.
"My mother grew up in a house, oldest of seven kids,” Huckabee continued. “She had lived in a house that didn’t have floors. Just dirt. No electricity. No running water. I resent it when people say, ‘Oh, people are poor because they want to be.’ No, they are not. Nobody wants to be poor. And that’s a stupid, foolish thing — mean thing — to say.
"People are poor because they don’t know how to get out of the hole. And government shouldn’t push them back in the hole, which is what our policies do when they punish people who want to go to work and don’t let them out.”
Huckabee is in his own hole in polling and is unlikely to do well in the caucuses on Monday. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has won over much of his coalition of organizers, and New York real estate mogul Donald Trump has gained the support of many of the others.
But in a race often characterized by bombast and escalating rounds of vivid insults, it was a reminder that a softer sell can — and at times has — won hearts here, too.
(Cover tile photo: Jim Young/Reuters)
