*crickets*
Via Washington Examiner:
Mike Huckabee on Tuesday told Americans he wants to take the country from hope to higher ground as he became the sixth Republican to declare for president during a rousing speech in his hometown of Hope, Ark.
The former Arkansas governor, who ruled in Little Rock for over a decade before leaving office in 2007, is hoping to recapture some of the magic that transformed him from an unknown to Iowa caucus winner during his first run for president seven years ago. Huckabee, 59, delivered a late morning speech before a full auditorium on the campus of a local community college, making a populist pitch for the White House that included term-limiting Supreme Court justices, replacing the income tax with a national sales tax and vowing no changes whatsoever to popular retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
“It was eight years ago that a young, untested, inexperienced and virtually unknown freshman senator made great speeches about hope and change. But eight years later, our debt’s more than doubled, America’s leadership in the world is completely evaporated and the country is more polarized than ever in my lifetime,” Huckabee said. “Ninety-three million Americans don’t have jobs, and many of them who do have seen their full time job with benefits they once had become two part time jobs with no benefits at all. We were promised hope, but it was just talk, and now we need the kind of change that really get America from hope to higher ground.”
The spot Huckabee chose to reveal his 2016 plans was meant to send another message — that he is uniquely qualified to take on the Clinton political machine. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, got her start in politics as the wife of Bill Clinton, the other famous politician to hail from Hope, Ark. Bill Clinton served as governor before going on to be elected president in 1992.