The Audacity of Bill Clinton's Hometown

I'm working through a to-do list that I'm maintaining in Twitter of things that I want to blog about.

Way, way back on February 12, I tweeted the following:

i have a blog post title. i have no idea what the post will be about, but i do have a post title. "the audacity of bill clinton's hometown."

And that was before I discovered that Mike Huckabee was born in Hope, Arkansas.

So I figured I'd look for other intersections between Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee, and Barack Obama, other than the fact that they're all politicians who wanted to be President at some point in their lives, and the fact that Obama and Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses - Bill Clinton came in 3rd place, although there's an excuse for that.

Here are some other commonalities:

• On February 21, Too Conservative predicted that Obama and Huckabee would win Texas. Although I haven't heard the final delegate count for Obama, the Huckabee prediction was a little bit off.


• Clinton and Huckabee are Southern Baptists. Obama is United Church of Christ.


• Both Obama and Clinton (along with Jimmy Carter) competed for a Grammy this year. (Obama won.)

And it's worthwhile to see what Eagle Forum types say about Clinton and Huckabee.

According to an opinion piece written by John Fund in the Wall Street Journal, "Paul Pressler, a former Texas judge who led the conservative Southern Baptist revolt, told me, 'I know of no conservative he [Huckabee] appointed while he headed the Arkansas Baptist Convention.'"

Fund went on to say that "Mr. Huckabee's reluctance to surround himself with conservatives was evident as governor, when he kept many agency heads appointed by Bill Clinton."

Fund also said this about Huckabee: "'He's just like Bill Clinton in that he practices management by news cycle,' a former top Huckabee aide told me. 'As with Clinton there was no long-term planning, just putting out fires on a daily basis. One thing I'll guarantee is that won't lead to competent conservative governance.'"

But is there any audacity in Bill Clinton's hometown - enough for a book? Not really, but it should be noted that Hope bureaucrats are as thorough as bureaucrats everywhere, as their 2005 animal control ordinance attests:

Animal: Means any description of a vertebrate creature,
domestic or wild, excluding homo sapiens.

As for the book that won the Grammy, it's amusing to see how the New York Times began its review of the book:

Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois and the Democratic Party’s new rock star, is that rare politician who can actually write....

Is it any wonder that the New York Times endorsed Hillary Clinton?

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