Huckabee looks like a heavy hitter to me. A charismatic guy who happens to be a Baptist minister, and who's a bit less loony than Brownback. Who else could the social conservatives vote for?
Update: I can't help myself from kind of liking this guy, though his social conservative outlook is radically different from mine.
In today's Repubican party, coming from a nativist base, it takes a lot of guts to say this in response to critics who say he's soft on immigration because he supports school and prenatal health care for illegal immigrants:
"We penalize law-breakers. We don't penalize their children for something they can't help.
If a child is gasping for air, asthmatic, and he's on the hospital
steps, what do the other [Republican] candidates suggest we do, let him
sit there and gasp until he doesn't have any air left and he dies? If a
child comes to our school -- and our law, by the way, in most of our
states, mine certainly says you've got to educate a child if he's of
child age -- what do you, break your own law and say, 'No, you can't
come in the schoolhouse door'?
No, you don't do that. What you do is you elect a president who will
fix the problem where it needs to be fixed: At the border. But if your
government at the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to
secure the border, you don't then grind your heel into the face of a
6-year-old child over it. That's not what this country does. We're a
better country than that.
Now, if that causes people to say, 'Well, I'm not going to vote for
him,' fine. There are plenty of [Republican] candidates out there who I
guess would grind their heel in the face of a 6-year-old child. Not me."
