I’ve got no idea what Huckabee means when he talks about America needing someone who is “horizontal,” but it sounds a bit awkward alright. It could be that he’s referring to uniting the country, no right, no left, just one country, but he could also be talking about this for all I care.
Then again, it really doesn’t matter much to me, we know that he’s openly appealing to Evangelicals and presenting himself as the Christian Leader. My God, he’s even using crosses, fishes, and other symbols in his ads. O, and in those ads he talks about how his faith doesn’t just influence him, no, it defines him. There’s nothing secretive going on here. He is what he is, and he’s proud of it.
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I think I read that Reagan had some similar phrase that he used-and it’s vertical that he’s advocating, not horizontal; horizontal being the polarity between left and right. He’s saying that everyone on both sides really wants what’s best for America (which is to move in the vertical direction- progress upward) and we should stop viewing ourselves as being on polarized positions in the horizontal directions.
And I think (if I understand you) I agree about the symbols; Huckabee is using Christian symbols and rhetoric in his ads, so why look for hidden "dog whistles"? It’s so silly- or perhaps these people are just trying to make it all seem more sinister or something. To me though, it reflects an irrational fear that extreme secularists seem to have about Christianity in our country. It is what it is, folks- a lot of Americans identify as Christians and appreciate a person who is not afraid to profess his own faith in public and describe how his faith affects his ideas about morality. If you don’t like how that would translate into public policy, then don’t vote for the guy, but you don’t have to make him into a boogeyman.
Josh Marshall is hilarious.
Yeah, I don’t see anything to this. It’s not nearly as cryptic as Rudy’s "strict constructionist judges" wink wink.