Patterson: Echoes of Hamilton in Huckabee’s Message

At Philly.com, Robert Patterson writes:

“Not long ago, pundits were dismissing Mike Huckabee as a religious-right candidate whose folksy demeanor wouldn’t fly outside the South. Yet in his presidential announcement this month, the former Arkansas governor is already distinguishing himself as the Republican with the most compelling vision in a generation.

Insisting ‘we need to be able to fight for ourselves by bringing manufacturing back to our communities where we make our own planes, tanks, bullets, and bombs,’ Huckabee is breaking from the globalist-corporatist groupthink that has handicapped the post-Reagan GOP. His championing of domestic nation-building imperatives that Alexander Hamilton outlined in Philadelphia will resonate not only in Middle America, but also in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

A strong dose of economic nationalism couldn’t be timelier, as a Democratic president and a Republican Congress prepare to deal away more prime sectors of our economy to rival nations, as well as third-world backwaters, via the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Huckabee cuts through all the ‘free-trade’ happy talk, noting that ‘unbalanced trade deals … undercut American workers, and drive wages lower than the Dead Sea.’

Yet more concerning to Huckabee is the threat to national survival as Washington and Wall Street have abandoned our healthy economic independence for dysfunctional codependency on foreign powers.”

Read the whole thing.