A Mike Huckabee flashback

(Noted by Josh Marshall at TPM.)

HERE is a video clip of Mike Huckabee, running for the Republican presidential nomination, on August 8, 2007. If one listens to Huckabee talk, he sounds sincere.

The first thing we've gotta do as a Republican party is quit being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the corporations that have done exactly what Steve [a disabled former steelworker with a shrunken pension and inadequate health care coverage--JW] talked about, and that is allow workers at the bottom to make money for their companies and then allow a CEO to get a pension, get a wonderful bonus, take a trip to the Riviera and Steve takes a trip to the poorhouse.

Not many Republicans are willing to say it, but we better say it or we‘re not going to win another election for a generation. We‘ve allowed a lot of people in the airline industry—the baggage handlers, the ticket agents, the clerks—to take 40 percent pay cuts. The executives steer the company into bankruptcy, they get a $200 million bonus.

It's based not on capitalism--that's a good thing--but this is sheer unadulterated greed, and that's not what makes a strong economy. And it's gonna ruin not just this country, but it's gonna collapse the Republican party if we don't start standing up and saying you can't have that kind of economy where CEOs make 500 times [the income] of their workers, and call that perfectly acceptable. It's not acceptable. And people like Steve have got to be factored into the equation ... you look at a guy like Steve and you realize, we better run for President and remember him and not just the folks who come to the high-price cocktail parties in Manhattan and Georgetown [....]

Huckabee never did explain in concrete terms how people like Steve should get "factored into the equation," but that question seems to have become moot anyway. Judging from Huckabee's speech at the Republican convention tonight, those people have gotten factored out of the equation again, and what was unacceptable in 2007 seems to have become OK now.

I really tire of hearing how the Democrats care about the working guy as if all Republicans grew up with silk stockings and silver spoons. [....] I'm not a Republican because I grew up rich, but because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life poor, waiting for the government to rescue me.

And Steve? Tough luck, Steve.

So does it follow, as Huckabee warned, that now the Republicans are "not going to win another election for a generation"? Only if there's justice in the world.

--Jeff Weintraub