Huckabee: Does he have a real shot?

Health scare of the week Getting too much of a jolt The buzz you feel after a can of Red Bull or Enviga isn’t “energy”—it’s an unhealthy increase in blood pressure and heart rate, says a new study. These energy drinks are loaded with caffeine and other stimulants that send heart rates soaring. When researchers gave two cans of a popular energy drink to 15 healthy volunteers, their vital signs changed dramatically in a short time. The blood pressure of the participants, whose average age was 26, increased by nearly 11 percent, and their heart rates increased by a whopping 11 beats per minute. “This occurred while participants were sitting in chairs watching movies,” study leader James Kalus tells HealthDay. The pounding hearts probably wouldn’t lead to any serious short-term consequences for young, healthy adults, he says, but a person already suffering from high blood pressure How the fifth planet might look or heart disease is asking for trouble.Mike Huckabee “is for real,” said Charles Mahtesian in The Washington Post. Just a few months ago, polls of likely GOP voters in the upcoming Iowa caucuses found the folksy Baptistpreacher- turned-presidential- candidate so far behind that his support had to be registered with an asterisk rather than a number. “Not anymore.” Somehow, despite a serious lack of campaign funds, the former Arkansas governor, 52, has “surged into second place” in Iowa, with an impressive 19 percent in the latest polls, trailing only Mitt Romney’s 27 percent. Huckabee’s “evangelical roots” are winning over religious voters in that traditional Farm Belt state, and his telegenic affability has “even charmed the national media (no mean feat for an anti-abortion Christian conservative.)” The real proof of Huckabee’s new status, said Michael Luo in The New York Times, is that his GOP rivals and some pundits “are beginning to take potshots at him.” As Huckabee, an avid hunter, put it himself, “You never put the cross hairs on a dead carcass.” I’m not surprised the liberal media loves Mike Huckabee, said Pat Toomey, president of the conservative Club for Growth, in National Review. Though he packages himself as a social conservative, the man’s a classic “big-government liberal” who believes social problems can be cured by spending taxpayer money. During Huckabee’s tenure as governor, “the average Arkansan’s tax burden increased 47 percent,” and though he’s pledged not to raise taxes if elected president, his campaign stump speech contains so much “class warfare rhetoric” about the poor and the evils of Wall Street that if you closed your eyes, you’d swear you were at a John Edwards rally. The conventional wisdom is that Huckabee wants to leverage a decent showing in the primaries into a nomination for vice president, but even in that role he’d be an embarrassment to a party built on Ronald Reagan’s small-government conservatism. Maybe, though, it’s time for a new kind of conservatism, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. When Huckabee raised taxes in Arkansas, he did so in order to raise teachers’ pay, rebuild roads, and extend health insurance to 70,000 children. “I’m a conservative, but I’m not mean about it,” says Huckabee, whose Christianity informs everything he does. “If I have to close my eyes to poverty and hunger, I’m not going to do that.” With the conservative movement split into feuding factions, Huckabee doesn’t fit neatly into any category. “And that is not a bad thing—in a Republican, in a candidate, or in a president.”

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