I heart Mike Huckabee.I’ve made that clear in the past, and since then he has done nothing to dissuade me. He seems like the type of character Aaron Sorkin would create for a two or three episode trial, and then scrap because he’s just too unrealistic. Take Gene Autry, Ronald Reagan, and Jared from Subway, and you have Huckabee–a singing, dieting, tax-cutting conservative. Now, after experiencing the traditional post-Maroon-column boost, he’s cracked the 10% mark in the polls for the first time in the campaign. To celebrate, he did what anyone would do in his situation: agree to an interview with Slate.For the most part, it’s kind of let-down, as he mostly just discusses trite campaign stuff, but he does hint at what I wrote about–why he presents the largest break from Bush, and thus why he should be the GOP nominee. Offered a softball on Mitt Romney’s “flip-flops,” he Pedroiad it:

I welcome him to the fold. I think that’s great. I also think it’s great he’s had an epiphany on the Second Amendment and the Bush tax cuts and the Reagan-Bush legacy, as well as on traditional marriage and farm subsidies. All of those are wonderful conversions, but anyone who doesn’t think the Democrats won’t use that video must have been out of the country and out of touch during the 2004 presidential campaign during the Swift Boat efforts on John Kerry.

The backhanded compliment is a welcome relief from standard-issue campaign put-downs, but its the second part that stands out–where he takes a shot at Rove-ian (and by extension Bush’s) politics. By taking that shot at Rove, he is implicitly connecting Romney and Giuliani with the current administration–although Huckabee seems to only have nice things to say about McCain–and thus making the argument that he really is the only real conservative vote for change….It’s not all golden for Huckabee, though. He totally butchers the last answer:

I love John Mellencamp’s music. I think he may be on a different page politically. There are a lot of musicians whose politics I don’t agree with. But there’s no crying in baseball, and no politics in music.

First off, Governor Huckabee, it’s John Cougar Mellencamp. Secondly…uh, what!? John Mellencamp? Just because John McCain says he loves ABBA doesn’t mean you have to like crappy music too.