Home schoolers for Huckabee

Washington Post:

Julie Roe, an early believer in Mike Huckabee, worked with what she had.

With no buttons, no yard signs and no glossy literature from his nearly invisible Iowa campaign, she took a pair of scissors and cut out a photograph of the former Arkansas governor. She pasted it on a piece of paper, scribbled down some of his positions, made copies and launched the Huckabee for President campaign in rural Hardin County.

Roe contacted friends in her home-schooling network and bought a newspaper advertisement for $38. She spread the word in the grocery store and the church foyer: "I would tell them about Mike Huckabee and they would say, 'Who's Mike Huckleberry?' I'd say, 'No, no, no, it's Huckabee.' "

Huckabee's name is no longer a mystery to Iowa's Republican voters, in large part because of an extensive network of home-schoolers like Roe who have helped lift his underfunded campaign from obscurity to the front of a crowded field. Opinion polls show that his haphazard approach is trumping the studied strategy of Mitt Romney, who invested millions only to be shunned by many religious conservatives such as Roe, who see the former Baptist preacher from Hope, Ark., as their champion.

While early attention focused on Romney and other better-known and better-funded opponents, home-schoolers rallied to Huckabee's cause, attracted by his faith, his politics and his decision to appoint a home-school proponent to the Arkansas board of education. They tapped a web of community and church groups that share common conservative interests, blasting them with e-mails and passing along the word about Huckabee in social settings.

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This explains some of the grass roots movement that has animated Huckabee's surge. People who like his stand on home schooling spreading the word through their networks. It does not appear to be based on much depth of knowledge about his stand on other issues and that is what troubles me about his surge. I am troubled by his ignorant criticism of the President's foreign policy. He sounds too much like a Democrat and I don't trust them on national security at all. He appears to be forfeiting the one issue where people favor Republicans over Democrats. It is the main reason to chose Republicans and he is giving it away.