BrianGarst.com

Mike Huckabee is making news over some comments regarding Obama’s upbringing. While  correcting on the O’Reilly Show his original statement that Obama spent part of his formative years in Kenya, when it was actually Indonesia, Huckabee further said this:

My point, really, even about talking about him raised in a different country, actually Indonesia, not Kenya, as I do understand, again, it’s right there in the book for me to read and anybody else if they care to, but the point that I do want to make is that creates a different worldview. This is not a kid who grew up, you know, going to Boy Scout meetings and playing Little League baseball in a small town.

Critics, and when it comes to Huckabee I usually am one, have jumped all over this statement, but for typically wrong reasons. Consider this brilliant insight:

If the absence of Little League or Scout meetings is really so disconcerting to Huckabee, we wonder what he would say about Ronald Reagan, who also never participated in either of those things (“I never cared for baseball … because I was ball-shy at batting,” he once said). In fact, out of all our presidents, only George W. Bush is a former Little Leaguer, and only John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and Bush were in the Boy Scouts. All of our other presidents, we guess, had an exotic, un-American upbringing, and a skewed worldview.

This is an absurd, and I can only assume, dishonest interpretation of Huckabee’s argument. That part about boy Scouts and Little League is being taken out of context, and way too literally. He was not saying that only people who do those two things are American, or have an American point of view. He was making a larger point, that Obama grew up in an environment that is atypical of the American experience, whatever that may be, and thus has a fundamentally different world view than those he governs.

Agree or disagree with the sentiment as one likes, but don’t be sophomoric and pretend like Huckabee’s sticking point is that Obama wasn’t a Boy Scout.

For my own part, I think there is some truth to Huckabee’s actual point, which is that Obama has “a different worldview,” though I disagree that his being raised overseas for a time has anything to do with it.

Obama really is disconnected from most of the country in how he views the world, much more so I think than he lets on even to his liberal followers, but the cause isn’t where he grew up, but rather who he chose to associate with throughout his life. This is a man who has spent literally his entire life insulated in a cocoon of far left radicalism, never straying far from the Bill Ayers’ and Reverend Wright’s. He never engaged his fellow Chicago professors in substantive discussion. He never explored any alternative ideologies outside Saul Alinksy radicalism. As a law professor he never published a single piece of legal scholarship, such that he might then have to encounter or defend against alternative views and criticisms. For a professor he was shockingly incurious, and it has created a bubble President, one who simply cannot comprehend the typical, or “American,” worldview of the people he governs.

Barack Obama Mike Huckabee