(Fred Weinberg) – I watched the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Report on Fox News tear into Mike Huckabee last week as “Democrat light” based on his economic populism and was appalled at the attitude of the newspaper’s editorial board. (Predictably, he got the same treatment from CBS for different reasons.)
Perhaps the newspaper’s own economic success has warped its view of how the world really works.
Mike Huckabee is a grownup. Scott Walker is a grownup. So are Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.
The coming election is going to be about putting the grownups back in charge of our government. (If it isn’t, we have a bigger problem.)
In 2008 and 2012, irrespective of his politics, we put a person in charge who never built or ran anything. All Barack Obama did was hire David Axelrod to build his campaign team and Axelrod delivered. And Obama was—to a majority of American voters—the perfect affirmative action hire.
The fallout from the last two elections is why this next election will be about putting grownups back in charge.
One thing that the folks sitting at the Wall Street Journal do not truly understand is that not everything that people at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and a host of other large corporations and banks dream up is either right or even legal.
That, you can be legitimately pissed off at Wall Street without being a liberal.
That, as Robert Duval’s character in The Godfather, Tom Hagen, said, “One lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns …”
Mike Huckabee understands that.
He couldn’t have been as successful working for the very same people who own the Wall Street Journal as he was without recognizing that.
Huckabee said, “I’m running for president because there’s a huge disconnect between Washington and the Real World. There’s a difference between making a speech and making government accountable to the people who pay for it.”
“We can never create prosperity for working people, grow our economy, and restore America as the greatest country on earth if we punish productivity and subsidize reckless irresponsibility.”
You know what scares Wall Street about Huckabee?
Those words “subsidize reckless irresponsibility”. That’s because you can become very rich by being recklessly irresponsible. Example? You and I bailed out the AIG insurance company. Do you know why and where the money ultimately went?
The why is that AIG created unique insurance policies which protected the buyers of securities based on bad mortgage loans. Only, unlike your car insurer, they didn’t have any reserves to cover those policies if the mortgages went bad. As to where the money went, the people who bought those policies which were made up to cover bad mortgages that they created were—you guessed it—the list of companies I named in the beginning of this column and a few more old and new Wall Street names.
You and I bailed these clowns out. We were fed a line of hogwash at the time that there would have been a meltdown of the economy if we didn’t bail them out. And the economy melted down anyway.
So how did these greedy bastards pay us back for bailing them out?
They got rich by using the “free” market to screw a lot of us.
If being against that is economic populism, if being against that makes you a liberal, than sign me up.
I’m a big believer in a free market also being an honest and fair market. Those are words that most Wall Street Masters of the Universe laugh at. Fairness and honesty are for suckers who live in Peoria, Illinois.
Huckabee doesn’t think so.
So, when I listen to an otherwise sane Kim Strassel blather on about how Huckabee’s “economic populism” could hurt the Republicans than I have this to say: If it does hurt the GOP, they deserve it.
After two terms of Doogie Howser Obama, I’ll take grownups like Huckabee any day of the week.
Mr. Weinberg is publisher of the Penny Press. Get to know more about him by visiting www.PennyPressNV.com.
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