Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee says Americans are looking for politicians to be more like the comedian who coined the phrase “Git-R-Done.”
Huckabee, a Republican who may run for president in 2008, is in Iowa this weekend and sat down Saturday afternoon for an interview with Radio Iowa and the Lee Enterprises newspapers. “Sometimes I think we need Larry The Cable Guy running for office so we can just ‘Git-R-Done’ because that’s what people really want out of us. They want competence. They want us to accomplish something,” Huckabee said. “I don’t think the average voter is as ideological as he or she is practical.”
According to Huckabee, voters aren’t asking for perfection from their politicians, but they just want their problems solved. “It’s almost as if you get people in the political realm breathing that rarefied air who forget that our job is not to make the other team lose, our job is to see to it that those folks sitting at the dinnertable tonight know that their problems are being addressed,” Huckabee said.
Huckabee leads a state where 86 percent of other state-level elected officials are Democrats. Huckabee’s advice to the Iowa Republicans he campaigned with this weekend is to promise to be a “consensus builder” rather than a partisan. “One thing I believe in that’s different from my perspective than what I see in Washington — there’s sort of this all-or-nothing mindset that seems to permeate there. It’s a win/lose deal,” Huckabee said. “What get frustrating is that there’s a total polarization and when you have the polarization you have paralysis.”
Huckabee said he hasn’t bought into the “gloomy and doomy” idea that Republican candidates will fare poorly in this November’s election. “If Republicans have a bad year, it’s not that people are buying into a Democrat message — because I don’t know that one exists,” Huckabee said. “They’re simply expressing anger and frustration.”
But Huckabee suggested that it’s time for Republicans to refocus. “I think no matter happens in 2006, I think our party’s due for some introspection. I think we’re due for…reminding ourselves why we are Republican and taking those core values and principles back to heart and then back to the American people,” Huckabee said.