Too bad the Texas primaries aren’t until March!  Huckabee often compares politics to being in a brutal sports arena.  And he’s right.  People of all walks of life get emotional and sometimes downright ugly when pushing for their candidate.  We are very fortunate that in our country, we don’t have riots or burn churches when a certain candidate doesn’t win an election.  I am so grateful for America…for the freedom to choose.  I once again urge you, whether you live in Iowa or New Hampshire or in one of the dozens of states whose primaries are in early February, get out there and exercise your right to choose the next leaders of our country.  Don’t let me or anyone else do your thinking for you.  Read transcripts.  Watch videos.  YouTube has made it so easy to see what a candidate really stands for.

Because I am a homeschooler who still supports Huckabee, I’ve included some quotes from Huckabee’s appearance last night on The Tonight Show.  You can view the spot and the complete transcript on the Huckabee website here.  I’ve taken some quotes from the transcripts that hopefully help show what kind of person Mike Huckabee really is…he is a likable guy, has a great sense of humor, is a political rebel in the sense that he wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and he really wants to lead America into greatness again.

People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off. I think that’s part of what’s going on right now. (in answer to a question on the Huckaboom surge in popularity)

Mike Huckabee, like Bill Clinton, is from Hope, Arkansas.  Naturally people want to know if they knew each other growing up.

We didn’t know each other growing up. He’s 9 years older, and he had moved away when he was like 7 years old and went to Hot Springs. When he ran for President, somehow it just didn’t sound right to say, “I believe in a place called Hot Springs.” So he talked about his birth place.

Huckabee was a minister for twelve years.  Leno asked him why he moved into politics:

You put a name and a face on everything, and I really began to believe that so many people making decisions that affect the way we live, the way our future would be governed, didn’t have a clue about how people were really struggling. It became evident to me that there were a lot of folks making decisions that didn’t understand poverty, hunger, or disease. They didn’t understand the challenges that people had in their families, and for my own three children, who were small at the time, I decided I don’t want to spend the rest of my life complaining about what “they” are doing.  And I finally thought it’s time to get out of the stands and on the field and get my jersey dirty.

Leno and Mike talked about his interest in guitar.  We learned that Mike started playing when he was eleven and got his first guitar.  It took his working-class parents a year to pay it off.

They paid $99 for whole rig guitar, amplifier. It took them a year to pay it off. My parents barely made enough money to pay the rent. We lived in a little rented house. It was a big sacrifice for them, but I played that guitar until my fingers nearly bled and until their ears nearly bled.

After the commercial break, the camera zoomed in on Huckabee doing a great job jamming out with the Tonight Show band.  It was great to see him rockin out!

Leno and Huckabee discussed his past living arrangements.  While Governor, he lived in a triple-wide mobile home while waiting for renovations to be complete on the Governor’s mansion.  He was the brunt of many jokes from the ‘establishment’ (those who think that manufactured home are trashy) for making this choice, but look at it.  This shows what kind of man Huckabee is.  He didn’t want to further strain the Arkansas budget, so he lived in a mobile home.   While Governor.  That, my friends, is the kind of humble attitude I am looking for in a president.  Huckabee is America, the America that pulls herself up by her bootstraps and gets the job done, no matter what it might require.  Would his opponents humble themselves in the same way?  Would they keep a sense of humor?

So we had an option to go out and rent this very expensive place or find alternative housing arrangements. We decided to move in a triple wide manufactured home on the grounds of the governor’s mansion. We knew we were going to take a beating.

JAY LENO: We had a million jokes about it.

(Laughter.)

Thank you. You supported the monologue for weeks with that.

(Laughter.)

MIKE HUCKABEE: The big line was they said, “I’m sorry. I’m running
late today. I was on the interstate and got behind the governor’s mansion.

Huckabee is also someone who has learned not just how to ‘talk the talk,’ but to walk the talk.  He lost 110 pounds because his doctor told him he was in dire straits.  Why was he overweight?  How did he lose it?

So I really changed my lifestyle. I started eating differently, got rid of the fried foods and sugars. You know, I’ll tell you something, when you grow up in the South, everything is fried. I mean, you don’t eat anything unless you fry it…And between that and not exercising, which I did not do, it really caught up with me. I was in a health crisis. So my life was kind of representative of like a lot of people in this country that just don’t take care of themselves. We don’t have a healthcare crisis as much as we have a health crisis, and I was the epitome of it.

Some of my friends have questioned what Huckabee would do with taxes and our failing economy.  Leno and Huck talked about his ‘Fair Tax Plan’, which would dismantle the IRS (yea!) and charge a 23% consumption tax instead.  The poor would be protected because everyone would receive a ‘prebate’ check every month that was up to the poverty level, which essentially elminates the tax on the poor.  Why do changes need to be made?  Here’s a great reason why:

I met a guy in New Hampshire. This is an interesting point. He’s working a second shift at a machine shop, trying try to help his daughter go through Cornell. She’s in grad school. $54,000 bucks a year to help her out. And he’s working a second shift. My first thing was, “Thank you, Lord. My daughter is not in grad school at Cornell because that’s a lot of money.” But then he tells me, “I’m now in a new tax bracket because I’m working a second shift, and the additional taxes I’m paying almost takes away what I’m getting on the second shift.”
What we’ve done is we’ve told him that, if he really, really works hard, we’re going to make it really hard for him to help his daughter. Here is how he can get his daughter some help: Quit both shifts, stop working, and he could then qualify for his daughter to have some federal assistance. That’s nutty.

Huckabee is so right!  I worked my way through college earning 11K a year.  I never qualified for a Pell Grant.  I wasn’t until I stopped becoming a productive member of society and quit my job in order to be an unpaid student teacher that I qualified for a grant.  Our system today rewards those who are unproductive.  That’s wrong.  It’s backwards.  And Huckabee agrees.

We ought to have a system that encourages people to work, to think about the small business guy that sketches out the idea on his kitchen table. He wants to go into business for himself, but his greatest competitor is not the guy across town or across the country. His greatest competitor is his own government that makes it real difficult for him to fill out the paperwork and pay the taxes.

If Huckabee wins the nomination, who would he like to see running against him?  Who among the Democrats does he respect?

Look, I have respect for anybody that runs for president. I have a great respect for Barack Obama. I think he’s a person who is trying to do in many ways what I hope I’m trying to do and that is to say let’s quit what I call “horizontal politics.” Everything in this country is not left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. I think the country is looking for somebody who is vertical, who is thinking, “Let’s take America up and not down,” and people will forgive you for being left or right if you go up.

I agree.  Let’s go UP, America!   It’s not too late to be great again.