If you watched him on the Today Show this morning, you might have a new appreciation for why Mike Huckabee is surging both in both Iowa and in national polls in the race for the Republican nomination. In an interview with Meredith Viera, Huckabee turned the hubub over the “floating cross” in his Christmas ad into a lament about the absurdity of political correctness and the sullying of Christmas by conventional politicians. He stood by his criticism of President Bush’s “arrogant” foreign policy by touting the “Powell-Schwarzkopf doctrine” of overwhelming force. Then he deftly dismissed the GOP establishment’s opposition to him with a populist riff that was Edwardsian in both style and content. One money exchange:
Huckabee: The Wall Street-to-Washington axis, this corridor of power, is absolutely, frantically against me. But out there in America, the reason we’re number one in the polls is because I’m the guy that doesn’t have some offshore mailbox bank account in the Caymans hiding my money. I’m the guy that worked my way up through it. And there are a whole lot of people in America that believe that the president ought to be a servant of the people and ought not to be elected to the ruling class….
Viera: So why do you think they’re opposed to you, Governor?
Huckabee: Because they don’t control me.
Watch the whole interview here.