I’ve already spoken at length about how annoyed I am by the two-year campaign cycle that this country insists on putting its voters through. The never-ending obsession with the minutiae of candidates’ private lives is tiresome, and I hate that the media ignores actual news while they wait for a candidate to shoot himself in the foot. Despite my principled disapproval, however, I have to admit that watching important people do stupid things has a certain appeal. Especially after a week of horrible midterms – sometimes we just need to sit back and laugh at the idiotic things these politicians let slip out of their mouths.
The prize for first big gaffe of the 2012 election cycle already goes to potential candidate Mike Huckabee, who recently inspired public outrage by suggesting that Natalie Portman was setting a bad example by “[glamorizing] the idea of having children out of wedlock.” Upon realizing that Natalie Portman is the wrong person to insult right now (who doesn’t love a beautiful, pregnant, Harvard-educated, Academy-Award-winning actress?) Huckabee tried to justify his slight on Portman by claiming that he was simply using her as an example to bring up the “economic realities of unwed mothers.” This justification, of course, makes no sense because Natalie Portman is an extremely successful woman whose economic reality probably involves deliberating over which multi-million dollar house to raise her future child in, not to mention that she is already engaged to be married.
Huckabee’s obsessive concern for unwed mothers as opposed to single mothers makes it hard for me to believe he is talking about anything other than his opposition to pre-marital sex. I don’t think that his affront on our current favorite actress should actually be the story here, though. What people should be talking about are the comments he went on to make about single mothers in general.
“Most single moms are very poor … and if it weren’t for government assistance their kids would be starving to death,” Huckabee said.
And this is the part of the story where, if you could see me, I would be flailing my arms around in anger as I cast about for words to express my annoyance. Certainly, single motherhood is a difficult job and it would be easier with two incomes, but to assert that most single mothers are unable to keep their children alive without Uncle Sam is frankly offensive. I’m not going to say there are no single mothers on government assistance, but there are also traditional families on government assistance, and there are countless single mothers who carve out happy, successful lives for their families. Huckabee’s comments make it sound like the only way to ecape the poverty trap is to get married to a member of the opposite sex and have a house in the suburbs with the societal average 2.5 children.
As if Huckabee hadn’t said enough ridiculous things for one week, he recently released a book in which he claims that the family “is the most fundamental unit of government” which, to my lefty brain, sounds like “you have no right to privacy.” Huckabee apparently also uses his book to extol the dangers of Obama’s (nonexistant) “Death Panels.” Though Huckabee has not yet announced whether he intends to run in 2012, the scariest thing about him if he does choose to run will be that his gaffes are less politically problematic than his actual beliefs.
