Congratulations to Huckabee! He won Iowa by 9 points, 34% to 25% over Romney (with 95% reporting).
You will want to listen to his victory speech. It’s good, and only about 5 minutes long.
Plus this is a good bonus 5 minute interview clip from FoxNews.
Way to go, Huckabee! May the momentum continue.
Before I go, let me provide an excerpt from David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times and regular commenter for PBS’ The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In a column entitled The Two Earthquakes, Brooks has this to say of Huckabee’s win.
On the Republican side, my message is: Be not afraid. Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong.
Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.
Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.
Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.
In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.
A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.
Will Huckabee move on and lead this new conservatism? Highly doubtful. The past few weeks have exposed his serious flaws as a presidential candidate….
…
Huckabee probably won’t be the nominee, but starting last night in Iowa, an evangelical began the Republican Reformation.
One other worthy link is Michael Medved’s “Told You So” at Townhall.com.
Again, congratulations to Huckabee and his many supporters. We can pull this off! Go Huckabee!