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Huckabee’s Therapeutic Cult

Huckabee. It sounds like one of those American restaurant chains popular across the South, the kind of place where on All You Can Eat Tuesdays the patrons down buckets of barbecued ribs and fried chicken while sucking on 32-ounce tumblers of diet soda. ~Gerard Baker The chain restaurant meme continues, but from this sentence it […]

Huckabee. It sounds like one of those American restaurant chains popular across the South, the kind of place where on All You Can Eat Tuesdays the patrons down buckets of barbecued ribs and fried chicken while sucking on 32-ounce tumblers of diet soda. ~Gerard Baker

The chain restaurant meme continues, but from this sentence it is clear that Gerard Baker has never actually been to these chain restaurants.  There is also something strange about the association of Huckabee, weight-loss fanatic, with restaurants that are renowned for serving people excessive portions.  If this meme gets around, I can see it aiding Huckabee in small but important ways.  If most Republicans are suburban voters, and since these restaurants cover the suburbs like locusts during a blight, linking Huckabee in their minds with these restaurants would make him just a bit more attractive to them.  Plus, as weight-loss guru, he represents the kind of popular therapeutic self-help culture (which is in turn fueled by the overindulgence that the chain restaurants represent) that Michael long ago feared might make him popular:

I don’t want a President whose primary qualification seems to be the self-mastery of weight loss, spurred by diabetes.  I fear also that this is exactly what the American people do want. 
   

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