I invite you to read this AP article. It fascinates me how Crazed Right Candidates for President (announced or not...yet) continue trying to thread that needle, to wit: gin-up the hate and consolidate The Wacko Base for a presidential run, while simultaneously holding out that they're a candidate for all the nation.
Huckabee hanging out with his favorite fan of pro-child molestation songs.
Take Mike Huckabee (please), for example, in this article: fascinating "dog whistle" stuff. He says he doesn't want to talk so much about "cultural issues," but instead wants to focus on "national security," first and foremost the threat of "Islamic jihadism" poses to the U.S. Right. O.K. Sure.
Here's the thing: whether or not one agrees with the entirety of the Pentagon's, NSA's, CIA's, and the Administration's (and, domestically, the FBI's) policies and actions (air strikes, drone attacks, spying, intel-gathering, logistical support to allies, etc), I think they all "get" that this is an issue and a national security threat. So what's Huckabee's deal? What he wants to do is turn this into a purely religious thing, which, of course, gets us right back to pushing all the creep-button issues that Right Wing Fundagellicals wallow in. Continued below the fold...
In other words, if saying (screaming, wigging-out on) "Islamic jihadism" can act as shorthand for. . . overturning or at least circumvent Roe v. Wade; gettin' your hate on against same sex marriage; teaching America's children the Earth is 6,000 years old and that climate change is a elaborate, conspiracy-saturated hoax; supporting your local police if or when they beat-up or kill African-Americans; freaking and hating on those awful and scary Brown People from South of the Border (who carry Ebola, Islamicism, and babies into Our Dear Nation); and a half dozen other delusional blatherings, then so be it and all the better!
Of course (alas), the MSM won't call him out on this. But it's an Open Secret that this is exactly what's going on here, that Huckabee (and others in the Kreepy Klown Kar) will do their damnedest to screech, "Islamic Jihad! Islamofascist Terrorists! Sharia Law!" in order to (alas) work-up their based into a lather of hate and paranoia, dog-whistle a bunch of other issues that most of the country disagrees with the GOP on, and (once again) get poor and working class white America to vote against its own interests.
Huckabee and his fellow putative Republican primary contenders understand what H.L. Mencken noted back in July 1923 in his essay on Anglo-Saxons (I'm one of them, by the way):
The normal American of the "pure-blooded" majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed, and he gets up every morning with a sickening feeling that his underwear has been stolen. . .
His political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost devoid of esthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. . . He fears ideas almost as much as he fears men. His blood, I believe, is running thin; perhaps it was not much to boast of at the start. . . .
So, to the extent they can ooze themselves out of the mire of their own followers in order to get a handle on the situation, they do so and seek to exploit it.