Huck & The System

Good online interview with Huckabee from Newsweek. Wanted to highlight two excerpts. One explains why i want to shed light on our flawed political system, why i support someone like Huckabee generally. And the other provides a glimpse of why i support Huckabee specifically.

But why can’t you raise more money?
McCain-Feingold is really a very corrupted system. It’s a disastrous system. If you’re a federal officeholder, a senator, you just transfer some money over to your presidential campaign from your Senate campaign and you’ve jump-started the whole process so you can hire fund-raisers, you can send letters, you can do all this stuff that … it takes money to raise money. So you have to have money to start with, or if you’re very wealthy, you write a personal check, you pop it into your account, because you can give unlimited amounts to your own campaign. It’s not because the law restricts me, but my checkbook restricts me. So we have a system that is really tilted toward already entrenched Washington politicians and very wealthy people. We need to be screaming about how the process is really corrupt. But I’m not one of these going around whining about it.

Excerpt #2

Dan Bartlett, former counsel to President Bush, recently remarked that you have "obvious problems" as a candidate. These "problems" were your last name, Huckabee, which he apparently thought was flawed in some way, and the fact that you're from Hope, Ark. What is your response?
My last name has never opened doors for me because it's not the name of a prominent, wealthy or heralded political family. But the Bible says that "a GOOD name is more to be desired than great riches." And my name represents the sacrifice, hard work, and old fashioned discipline that my Dad gave me when he didn't have the education, wealth or position to give me anything else. It's a name I wear proudly—not just for myself, but all those who like me have fought their way beyond poverty to live and love the American dream.

P.S. What the interview doesn't mention about Bartlett's comments is that he called Huckabee "the most articulate, visionary candidate of anybody in the field."