Huckabee: Fried squirrel in a popcorn popper

This is just frickin' creepy. GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was on MSNBC's Morning Joe, where he talked about how he would fry some squirrel in a popcorn popper while in college. From YouTube:



Now while the source of this story is through TPM, Huckabee has referred to his popcorn-popper-frying squirrel days before. According to this December 27, 2007 Los Angeles Times story:

OSCEOLA, IOWA -- Grasping a freshly killed pheasant and hoisting a shotgun over his shoulder, Mike Huckabee on Wednesday invited reporters to witness what has become one of the standard motifs of Republican presidential politics: the candidate out hunting, like a regular guy.

But the undertone was clear: Huckabee was casting himself as an authentic sportsman, unlike chief rival Mitt Romney, who last spring had claimed to be an avid hunter before admitting that he had preyed mostly on "small varmints" -- and infrequently at that.

In fact, Huckabee said, not only had he hunted varmints himself -- in addition to deer, ducks, antelopes and, now, pheasants -- but he also was an experienced varmint-eater, having downed his share of fried squirrel, biscuits and Coke as a college student.

"I figured out you could put grease in a popcorn popper and heat that thing up, and you could cook anything," he said in an interview. "So we fried squirrel."

And with that the contest for the world's most powerful job centered not on policy and substance in the run-up to next week's Iowa caucuses, but on the question of authenticity.

There is a message here, concerning Huckabee's college squirrel-frying days. Huckabee is using this squirrel-frying story to show Republican voters that he is one of them--an "Awe Shucks" kind of guy--while also hinting that Mitt Romney is another silver-spoon-in-his-mouth conservative elitist. Huckabee is really taking a page out of George W. Bush's 2004 playbook, where Americans would love to have a beer with George W. Bush and shoot-the-breeze, instead of the snobbish, white-wine-drinking Democratic candidate John Kerry. Huckabee is taking that page, and using it to sell himself as a good old evangelical Southern boy to the conservative voters. Huckabee is trying to tell the voters that he is the authentic presidential candidate, while Mitt Romney is the phony candidate who will say anything to get elected. It is a very clever media manipulation, by the Huckabee campaign, to really court both the southern and evangelical base--especially those voters in the upcoming South Carolina primary.