Mike Huckabee is something of a hometown hero at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. More than two thousand people rose and cheered, and he gave them exactly what they wanted — pure red meat.
He began with John Boehner and the Pope. “Speaker Boehner meets privately with the Pope and the result is he is quitting. It occurs to me, I wonder if we can get a private meeting between Pope Francis and the president.”
Huckabee denounced the Iran deal and then unleashed a tirade against Hilary Clinton for opposing the Keystone Pipeline. He was especially incensed that she chose the week of the Pope’s visit to announce her opposition.
A huge part of his message is his experience fighting who may very well be the Democratic nominee. “I’ve been fighting the Clintons all of my political life,” he said. He recalled how the Clintons would touch down on Air-Force One and campaign for his hand-picked opponent. In his first year in office he installed an 800 number for corruption that resulted in 1,000 phone calls and eventually 15 indictments of Clinton cronies.
Huckabee is also running against the GOP establishment. He said he visited 37 states the during the last election year in order to help build a Congressional majority, and the result is “they are doing as a majority precisely what they did in the minority.” As a measure of the anti-establishment fervor of the Values Voter crowd, they once more stood and cheered.
Huckabee showed a bit of frustration with the issue of defunding Planned Parenthood because he wants much more. He invoked the 42 years since Roe V. Wade and said he intended to raise the personhood of the unborn child in the Constitution.
He also made a pitch to overturn judicial supremacy. “I know this much,” he said. “The Courts cannot make a law and I will take the oath to defend the Constitution and I will not surrender the executive branch and the legislative branch to the Court. I will bring back checks and balances and someone like Kim Davis will never go to jail again.”
The crowd drowned him out.
Huckabee’s problem became immediately apparent when Ben Carson was announced next. The applause for Carson was even louder and longer than that for Huckabee.
Follow Austin Ruse on Twitter @austinruse