Mike Huckabee's con game

Paul Waldman, American Prospect - Mike Huckabee is widely known as an amiable fellow. Whatever you might think of his politics, he seems like a nice guy. But Mike Huckabee is a con artist...

Like many conservative pundits, Huckabee maintains an email list that he uses to generate income. The way it works is that because of his public profile, lots of people will sign up for his list, and then he can sell those names and addresses to people who want to sell things to those people. Maybe it's a book from a conservative publisher, say, or a pitch to donate to a conservative cause. But in many cases, it's just a con...

The key element in the confidence man's game is confidence—the confidence that the mark has in the con man. The mark needs to trust you, and then you can steal anything from them. And the people on his email list, who I'm sure consist mostly of elderly white people in the South and Midwest, trust Mike Huckabee. When the snake-oil salesman with the secret biblical cure for cancer pays Huckabee to send a promotional email to that list, he's renting that trust, which will enable him to steal those people's money.

Now let's think about this on an individual level. Right now there's a devout couple in their 80s who just found out that their 55-year-old daughter has cervical cancer. They're terrified. They'd do anything to help her. And then they get an email from that nice Mike Huckabee, pointing them toward a miracle cure for cancer hidden right there in the Bible. It must be legit, because Mike Huckabee wouldn't rope them into a scam. So they head right over to the web site, watch the video about the "Matthew 4 protocol" and the "frankincense extract," then they send away for the free bonus gift of "The Bible's Healing Code Revealed" which comes with a one-year subscription to Dr. Mark Stengler's Health Revelations—half price if you're a senior citizen!—and they whip out that credit card and start ordering all the supplements they can. They tell their daughter, with pain and fear in their voices, that this is what can cure her if only she'll believe and they keep buying.

These are the people—gullible, afraid, at the most desperate point of their lives—that Mike Huckabee sees as marks just waiting to be scammed.