It is increasingly self-evident that traditional conservatives have nothing to offer the young. Despite a millennial midterm moodswing, the Grand Old Party still has a severe problem appealing to young people, so of course Mike Huckabee is trying to alienate everyone under the age of 45 with some old time religion about the evils of dancing to rock and roll music. Huckabee is a class act in person, but he’s so enveloped by a bubble of promise ring-wearing homeschoolers that he thinks they represent the rising generation. Heaven knows nothing wins the kids over quite like lecturing them to abstain from lewd and loud entertainment:
DES MOINES, Iowa — Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has accused President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, of double standards in parenting, saying in an interview published Tuesday that the first family shelters its daughters from some things but allows them to listen to the music of Beyonce.
The sharp rhetoric signals that, should he run for the Republican presidential nomination, Huckabee would make cultural and social issues the cornerstones of his campaign.
While promoting his new book, the former Baptist pastor told People magazine, “I don’t understand how on one hand they can be such doting parents and so careful about the intake of everything — how much broccoli they eat and where they go to school … and yet they don’t see anything that might not be suitable” in Beyonce’s lyrics. He also said Beyonce’s choreography is “best left for the privacy of her bedroom.”
Translation: ‘Hey there black women, why aren’t you ashamed of your bodies?’ Achieving a trifecta, Huckabee’s argument is implicitly racist and sexist with a cherry pit of stupid on top of the batshit sundae. He seems to be saying that girls who eat broccoli and study hard should shut their young, healthy bodies away from his sight, where they can’t tempt him into having impure thoughts. This is not an objection to the objectification of women, he’s projecting his own shame on the potential objects of his temptation. Stop tempting Uncle Sugar with your above-the-ankle hemlines, you little sluts!
But Huckabee’s sniffing appraisal of a multiplatinum singer is what I find most offensive. How is Huckabee going to govern in a nation that listens to hip-hop when he still doesn’t seem to have gotten over the way that Elvis moved his hips on the Ed Sullivan Show? A 2016 Huckabee candidacy will be a gift to cartoonists, satirists, and the ghost of Frank Zappa. Al Gore’s disastrous ‘music label’ hearings are a big reason why he was not elected president. If Americans want government out of their bedrooms, then they certainly won’t care for Huckabee’s opinions on the contents of their iPods, much less the First Family’s.
Even Reverend Shaw Moore is more enlightened and evolved than Mike Huckabee. What does that make him?