SPRINGTIME FOR HUCKABEE

Steve Benen notes this at the Carpetbagger Report:

On CNN yesterday, Mike Huckabee stood by his previous comments, describing legalized abortion as the equivalent of a Holocaust. "I think it is," Huckabee said. "I don't know what else you can call it."

In using this term to describe abortion, Huckabee's just doing what many, many abortion opponents do -- but there does seem to be an odd tendency in the Huckabee household to invoke the Nazi era in ways that aren't commonplace.

Remember last August, when the candidate compared voting for him to saving Jews from the Nazis?

When Mike Huckabee neared the end of his speech to the thousands of Iowans about to vote in the straw poll for Republican presidential candidates Saturday, he drew on a personal experience at a faraway place for inspiration: a family visit to Yad Vashem.

"I wanted them to see what happens when good people just sit back and do nothing, when they don't act," the former Arkansas governor said, "because what happened to the millions of Jews who were killed during the reign of terror under Adolf Hitler in World War II [happened] because a lot of decent people, calling themselves Christians, simply looked the other way."

At the end of the tour of Yad Vashem, Huckabee watched his 11-year-old daughter Sarah, who had been silent throughout the visit, sign the guest book. "She wrote words I'll never forget as long as I live. These are the words she wrote: 'Why didn't somebody do something?'"

..."Ladies and gentlemen, right here in Ames, Iowa, you're the somebody. You can do something," Huckabee said. "You can help this entire country decide that it's not going to elect a president based on the raising of money, but based on the raising of the hopes and the ideas that can make us a better, freer and safer nation." ...

And a few years ago, his wife got into the act. Huckabee had been criticized for setting up a charitable organization in his name while he was lieutenant governor and not divulging the names of the donors. According to The American Spectator (quoting the Arkansas News Bureau), Janet Huckabee

defended secrecy about the donors to her husband's "charity" by saying that a donor's name "wouldn't be enough. [Then] you'd want to know who he was married to, and then his wife would be German descent, and you'd have Mike, you'd have him responsible for 600,000 killings of Jews."

Yikes.

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By the way, you should read that AmSpec story if you want a one-stop-shopping version of all the mud (apart from the Wayne DuMond story) that's going to be flung at Huckabee if any rival candidate ever concludes he's worth attacking.

I think no one's attacking him yet because no one's figured out the angles -- Romney isn't bothering because he's still far ahead of Huckabee in Iowa and New Hampshire (the only two states he cares about right now), while Giuliani apparently thinks he's not competing with Huckabee for the same voters (if that's really what he thinks, I think he's wrong). Thompson and McCain, for their part, don't seem to be thinking about what angles to play at all -- instead of trying to pinpoint specific candidates who stand in their way, they both seem to have an electoral strategy that consists of saying, "Well, I'm here," and accepting whatever votes that gets them.