Beyonce performs at halftime of the Super Bowl in 2013. BECAUSE SHE'S INCREDIBLY MAINSTREAM.
Mike Huckabee's desire to blow a gently condescending dog whistle about Barack and Michelle Obama's parenting in relation to black popular culture may have run into Mike Huckabee's ignorance about American popular culture more generally. The likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate is going after the president and first lady for letting their teen daughters listen to Beyonce.
Really:
Especially, the former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister says, if the president and first lady ever actually listened to the lyrics to – or seen a performance of Beyonce's steamy "Drunk in Love."
The Obamas "are excellent and exemplary parents in many ways," Huckabee says.
"That's the whole point. 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 making sure they're kind of sheltered and shielded from so many things – and yet they don't see anything that might not be suitable for either a preteen or a teen in some of the lyrical content and choreography of Beyoncé, who has sort of a regular key to the door" of the White House.
It's hard to think of an artist more mainstream than Beyonce, who has sold more than 15 million albums in the United States as a solo artist, and close to another 15 million more (again, in the United States; the worldwide number is much higher) with Destiny's Child. And as a successful businesswoman and someone who's been in a relationship with her husband for virtually her entire adult life, she matches the kind of values Huckabee claims to espouse more than the vast majority of Americans. Except for the part where she's black and an outspoken Democrat.
Huckabee, though, does have some pop-culture favorites he wants to talk about: 19 Kids and Counting's Duggar family. The reality television family endorsed Huckabee in 2008, and he's hoping for a repeat if he runs. Homeschooling your 19 children whose dating lives you entirely control, who will only side hug the people you have chosen for them to date until the moment they kiss at the end of a wedding ceremony, who are not allowed to watch television (while being on reality TV themselves)—that's apparently the kind of parenting Huckabee endorses over allowing your kids to listen to Beyonce. This position might appeal to certain very cloistered (read: old, white) Republican primary voters, but it's really not going to be a good general election strategy.