Mike Huckabee to run for president in 2016

Mike Huckabee to run for president in 2016

Mike Huckabee hopes to win over the conservative majority and obtain the highly contested Republican presidential nomination.

The former Republican Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee will be announcing his bid for president today at 11 am. Huckabee is expected to win the support of many conservative evangelicals.

This will be Huckabee’s second run for president, after trying unsuccessfully in 2008. Although he won the Iowa caucus in that race, he soon ran out of money. He was unable to sustain his lead or even defend himself against attacks from other Republican candidates. For instance, Mitt Romney aired a political attack ad claiming that Huckabee had given scholarship money to undocumented workers.

“You do have to have a lot of money to be able to not only push your own campaign, but you have to be able to defend your record against all these crazy attacks that will come against you,” said Huckabee.

Since then, Huckabee has become much more popular thanks to his Fox News TV show and fervent commentary about the politics of the day. Perhaps more than any other candidate for 2016, Huckabee has spoken out about the economic issues facing working class Americans.

“I put America and its workers first. Too many in the political class put Wall Street and Washington elites first. They aren’t fighting for American workers,” wrote Huckabee in an op-ed for Iowa’s Des Moines Register.

On his show and off, Huckabee often promotes the conventional American wisdom of ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’.

“When I hear all these people talking about poverty, sometimes, I’m amazed that they act like they know what that means. They don’t know what that means,” said Huckabee on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “I’m not a Republican because I grew up rich, I’m a Republican because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life poor, waiting for the government to rescue me.”

Huckabee faces a crowded Republican bid this time around. Indeed, he is the third person to announce his or her candidacy so far this week. On Monday, former neurosurgeon Ben Carson announced his intention to run for president, as did the former CEO of Hewlett Packard Carly Fiorina.

In addition, Huckabee will have to contend with several other 2016 hopefuls who may draw conservatives away from him. Particularly, Rick Santorum, the winner of the 2012 Iowa caucus, would be a huge threat should he choose to run.

For all Huckabee’s charm and ‘home grown wisdom’ he has often angered women. In a speech last year, he argued that Democrats insulted women “by making them believe that they are helpless without ‘uncle sugar’ coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government.”

Huckabee, for some unknown reason, has also taken issue with the king and queen of the hip hop music scene- Beyonce and Jay-Z.

While promoting his new book God, Guns, Grits and Gravy, Huckabee called Beyonce’s music “mental poison” and criticized the Obamas for letting their daughters listen to it. In the book itself, Huckabee asks whether or not Jay-Z was “”arguably crossing the line from husband to pimp by exploiting his wife as a sex object?”

Nonetheless, Huckabee does have a credible argument for the Republican nomination. He claims he is the only one experienced and capable of taking on the Clinton political machine.

“I hear some people say we’re going to have to have someone who knows how to fight. I’ll tell you what, if you battled the political machine that I battled, you know how to fight,” said Huckabee in New Hampshire last month.

Huckabee is expected to announce his candidacy in Hope, Arkansas- the town which both he and Bill Clinton call home.

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