Beth Arnold for BuzzFlash: Why You Shouldn't Vote for Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Other Republicans
October 26, 2022
By Beth Arnold
SOME MONTHS AGO, I received an “OFFICIAL GOP PRIORITY SURVEY DOCUMENT” from the Sarah Huckabee Sanders campaign. Huckabee Sanders is running for Arkansas governor in a campaign meant to be as divisive and alienating to Arkansas residents—pitting one against another—as her mentor Donald Trump has done to our country’s citizens nationally.
“Dear Fellow Arkansas Patriot,” she wrote, to stroke the receivers’ egos. The implication was that conservative Republican voters were the chosen ones, and anyone who didn’t agree with the Trump Maga World GOP, which Huckabee Sanders constantly touted at least indirectly, was not a true American.
Add the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance along with the word “patriot” to the list of American symbols that have been co-opted by Republicans as if no other Americans are allowed to use them. As if the rest of us who don’t fall into goosestep with them and their beliefs are mortal enemies. This is one of the snares the GOP uses to manipulate voters, and it’s more than effective.
This letter was a direct mail solicitation to put money in Huckabee Sanders’ campaign pocket, though it was clumsily camouflaged as a questionnaire to determine the recipients’ views on such loaded questions as, “Do you share my belief that American have a right to lives free of tyranny and socialism?” “Do you oppose radical environmental policies like the Green New Deal?” “Do you believe ‘cancel culture’ and Big Tech silencing our views is a threat to conservatives?”
There’s lots to quibble about here, but I’ll take the low-hanging fruit. Ms. Huckabee Sanders might need to brush up on American programs like Social Security, Social Security Disability, and Medicare, which have put Americans squarely in socialistic programs for some time. In fact, most, if not all, Americans would be enraged if these programs were taken away. But the GOP has learned they can push the buttons of many voters by threatening them with the terror of socialism in the USA.
Some Democrats fall prey to this as well. They ought to know better. Some of the happiest countries in the world have liberal democracies employing the Nordic model for citizens’ welfare. The top three happiest countries are in Scandinavia, Finland taking the Number One spot for the last five years.
According to Expat Finland: The Finland Guidebook:
Finland enjoys one of the world's most advanced and comprehensive welfare systems in the world, designed to guarantee dignity and decent living conditions for all Finns. The Finnish social security system reflects the traditional Nordic belief that the state can intervene benevolently on the citizens' behalf. Core to the system are social insurance (ex. pensions, sickness & unemployment benefits, workers' compensation), welfare (ex. family aid, child-care services, services for the disabled), and a comprehensive health system.
A comprehensive health system? The horror!
Words like socialism and radical have been co-opted by the GOP to use as whips to herd Americans into corrals of fear and anger. Language has been weaponized to inflame and separate some citizens from other citizens who might have a different but perfectly valid opinion than their own, but without the fear, without the anger.
Whatever happened to accepting others’ points-of-view without forcing our beliefs on them—or at least not trying to annihilate them? Isn’t annihilation what just happened with the alleged beating and death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after being arrested by the Iranian morality police for somehow not wearing her Islamic garb correctly? Wasn’t this what happened in the genocide in Rawanda? One thing I learned in a Social Work graduate school is that you can’t legislate morality. It just doesn’t work.
ONE MIGHT THINK that this Huckabee Sanders direct mail piece was politically run of the mill, and maybe it is—for these days. The problem is that the further we’ve diverged from the truth, the more elusive truth has become. And when this divergence happened over and over and over while Donald Trump cried fake news, he actually ushered in the Post-Truth Era.
The American public witnessed this from the get-go of his presidency, when, on Meet The Press, Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway actually said that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s lies about Trump’s inauguration having “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration” were “alternative facts.” Chuck Todd answered her with, “Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.” He was being “nice.” She wasn’t. Journalists had to learn that it didn’t pay to treat Trump and his minions with the same standards of respect they normally used. The lies were too outrageous, too blatant, and too out of control.
But these underhanded tactics come straight out of the GOP playbook that Lee Atwater masterfully created in the 1980’s: Lie, cheat, steal, or flat make stuff up. Anything to win. A lack of honor eventually became the norm among Republicans who wanted to get elected. And if you haven’t seen the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, you need to watch it. Right now. “Can anyone understand American politics if he or she doesn’t understand Lee Atwater?” asks Republican strategist Tucker Eskew in Boogie Man. “I believe not.”
Eskew goes on to say that he asked Atwater, “Why did you go for the Republican Party, the Fuddy Dud Country Club set?” And Atwater said, “Hey, man, I have a lot better chance at doing something in the Republican Party.’” What the party stood for didn’t matter at all.
The GOP is still the Fuddy Dud Country Club set, and at the end of the day the mainline wealthy Republicans want to keep the poor and blue collars right where they are… working for them. For a well-reported reference from someone who grew up in it and wrote about it till the day he died, check out Joe Bageant’s books. I’d start with Rainbow Pie: a redneck memoir.
Huckabee Sanders followed Trump’s example and used the dishonest manifesto every single day she worked for him. As his press secretary, she lied constantly and admitted lying in her interview with the FBI during the Mueller investigation. Like Atwater, lying comes easily to her. More than that, she’s proud of it.
In Huckabee Sanders’ announcement to run for Arkansas governor, she claimed her greatest triumph was being Trump’s White House Press Secretary. “I took on the media, the radical left and their cancel culture, and I won,” she said. “Everything we love about America is at stake, and with the radical left now in control of Washington, your governor is your last line of defense.”
The radical left in Washington? Meaning Joe Biden? There she goes again. She needs to learn what the words she uses actually mean and how to use them accurately. But of course that’s not the point. For her, words are mere tools to manipulate the citizens of her state. In this, she is just another product of the Atwater-shaped GOP. The Grand Old Party learned long ago that if they usurped the language of an issue, they could control the narrative about it. Like I said, patriot is one of those words. For that matter, so is the phrase Right-To-Life. Who is against life? No one. Who actually wants to get an abortion? No one. These are tragic situations requiring heartbreaking decisions, which are now not even in a woman’s control—even with the medical advice of her own physician.
Huckabee Sanders knows how to fan the flames of the inflamed until they’re literally almost burning. These are voters whose life problems are real and hard, and who have come to feel that they aren’t being listened to by the Democrats. Democrats stupidly dropped that ball. These voters felt like no one cared until—and this should be laughable, but unfortunately it’s not—until Donald Trump happened along.
Trump would not spit on these people if they were on fire. He had spent his life as a social climber in New York, rap, rap, rapping on the doors of the tasteful living rooms of New York scions, who always saw him as the trash that he was. No one in Middle America would’ve ever known his name if then-NBC chief Jeff Zucker hadn’t handed Trump name recognition on a silver platter in the form of NBC’s The Apprentice reality TV show. Thank you, former wunderkind Mr. Zucker. This show also no doubt made Mark Burnett a ton of money, too. But was it worth the destruction of the known world (besides Trump’s shithole countries), Mr. Burnett?
In a recent ad for Huckabee Sanders, she is standing in a very expensive kitchen, and her daughter hollers, “Mom, the boys are watching CNN!”
“Absolutely not!” says Huckabee Sanders, clicking off the TV.
Can you imagine Beaver Cleaver yelling, “Mom, Wally is watching CBS News!” And June hollering back, “Wally, absolutely no Walter Cronkite.”
Democrats may be off-putting in their intellectualism. They may think they know better about the will and needs of their people—the ones who aren’t actually their people anymore—than the people themselves. The people we shake our heads about for voting against their own best interests. (See Trump not spitting on them if they were on fire, above.)
And Democrats did fail a big chunk of their base, which the GOP scooped up with the expert manipulation of Lee Atwater and the help of Fox News. But despite Roger Ailes’s efforts at Fox to maneuver and exploit the idea that these people were the GOP’s soul brothers, Republicans have never had their best interests in mind—all they wanted was their votes.
Ailes was another enfant terrible of manipulation. He studied the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of The Will by Leni Riefenstahl, and he went to work for Richard Nixon putting what he had learned into effect. That was before Ailes had an entire, and I use the term loosely, “news” channel to ensure his conservative ideologies were hammered into the American people without the burdens of truth, decency, or ethics.
“It was imparted to me right from the very beginning that it wasn’t about journalism,” said former Associate Producer of The O’Reilly Factor Joe Muto in the excellent documentary about Ailes, Divide and Conquer. “It was about drawing the biggest audience possible…We used to call it riling up the crazies. That’s what we were there to do. We were there to stir up outrage, because that’s what kept them watching.”
What both Atwater and Ailes knew—that the Democrats have evidently forgotten—is that you don’t win elections by appealing to people’s intellects. You win over voters with emotion.
During the Iran-Contra Affair, President Ronald Reagan lied about the United States selling arms to terrorists in Iran. He knew the United States had done it. The official explanation was that the arms sold were in exchange for American hostages. In reality, the proceeds were to fund the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua. At least Reagan came back later to act like he didn’t understand what had happened, even though he finally admitted it had happened. It was a lie to cover up a lie that basically masked what the money was for.
These days, politicians like Huckabee Sanders and Trump don’t bother to come back and admit they lied. They let the lie stand and repeat it continually.***
I’VE BEEN SAYING for years that these machinations of greed, racism, and class war are the death throes of old white men who are already dead and just don’t know it yet. And I’m not just talking about Republicans. When it comes to damaging rhetoric and behaviors, some Democrats can’t see the writing on the wall, and they resist embracing a future that young people could be excited about—a country with actual prospects that they want to be part of.
But the change that’s coming is taking a long time to get here. And it’s not just old white men holding us back. It’s politicians like Sarah Huckabee Sanders who care more about their own selfish interests and hunger for power over state and country. It’s the politicians following the Atwater playbook, willing to do anything and say anything to get elected. The politicians willing to follow a president down a path of ignorance, deceit, narcissism, and greed, politicians who couldn’t care less about what he did to our country as long as he got to play the despot he longed to be.
The strife and division Huckabee Sanders is creating by not honestly dealing with the issues in her own state and with her own people and instead using manipulation to get what she wants is the root of failure. What she and the others like her are doing is tearing down our country and destroying us as a nation. And she keeps not addressing any actual issues in this campaign while she keeps railing against the actually un-radical Biden, as if she were running for president instead of governor. Her MAGA rhetoric was ramped up to include the Republican opinionated Arkansas-Democrat Gazette (Arkansas Online) in the liberal media, which is another complete joke. And why? Because they nailed her on a stunt she tried to pull with their Letters To The Editor.
Huckabee Sanders also arrogantly declined to participate in a television debate on October 5th for Arkansas gubernatorial candidates. She finally participated in one on October 21st. The M.O. of her entire campaign has been making American journalists the enemy of the American people instead of the watchdogs of democracy. She has avoided them. Huckabee-Sanders didn’t even bother to show up for the post-debate news conference, which the other two candidates attended.
My criticism of the American press has more to do with their not holding politicians and candidates accountable for the out-and-out lies as well as misinformation they spread. It astonishes me that the Arkansas debate panel did not ask these candidates if they believed Joe Biden was fairly elected president—or if the election was stolen from Trump. What—and why? We have to look at journalists from abroad to do our job for us, as was the case with Australian journalist Leigh Sales, when she thrashed Huckabee Sanders with question after question instead of letting her fabulist tales stand, when she interviewed her. Sales was a watchdog for truth that we’re often missing in our own media.
Even after the debate that Huckabee Sanders refused to attend, I suspect she is also afraid her lack of knowledge and skill surrounding real issues pales in comparison to that of the accomplished Democratic candidate Chris Jones.
I recently saw an interview with the real Chickie Donohue, whose true story is told in the current movie The Greatest Beer Run Ever. The film documents exactly what the title implies. Donohue hops a boat from the streets of New York to Vietnam—during the war—to deliver beers to his friends stationed there. It is absolutely nuts, as well as a powerful account of personal evolution.
In the movie, Donohue—before his epiphany—asks a journalist covering the war why he has to report all the bad things that are happening there. Why does he have to report the truth? “The truth?” says the journalist, played by Russell Crowe. “The truth hurts us? No. The truth doesn’t hurt us. It’s the lies, the lies and the conspiracy to distort the truth…that’s what hurts America.”
In fact, it’s the only way our people can come together again and our democracy can survive. Truth couldn’t be more important.