Mike Huckabee inadvertently announced on Thursday morning that he has never set foot in a strip club when he released a campaign ad entitled “Strip Club.”
“Washington = strip club,” Huckabee tweeted, along with the 35-second cinematic achievement.
It opens with a shot of dollar bills strewn on the floor of one such “club,” smoke-filled air and shiny pole in background.
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“Washington. It’s a strip club,” the grumbly voiced narrator says.
You may be wondering how exactly Washington, a city of pasty men and women clad in ill-fitting suits and shift dresses, resembles a strip club. The narrator says it’s obvious.
“The political class dances for the donor class and the working class gets stuck with the tab.”
For Huckabee’s analogy to be correct, a strip club would have to be a place where non-stripper strip club employees—bouncers, bartenders—provide money to patrons to give to strippers. Maybe that’s what strip clubs in Arkansas and the land of Guns, Grits and Gravy are like, I don’t know. My calls to Centerfold Entertainment and French Quarter, two strip clubs in Hope, Arkansas, where Huckabee is from, went unanswered.
Asked if Huckabee has ever been to a strip club and if so what the name of the last strip club he attended was, his spokesman, Hogan Gidley, responded, “Are you seriously doing something on that? God Bless, Hogan.”
Informed that yes, I’m seriously doing something on that, Hogan replied, “No, he has never been.”
Huckabee, who is polling at 3 percent in the Republican primary, is, by the looks of this ad, not even really trying anymore. The dialogue in the ad that is not about strip clubs seems to have been produced by a right-wing meme generator, and the footage in the ad seems to have been lifted from old Huckabee ads.
Huckabee first appears at the 13-second mark, somberly driving a car and wearing the same blue button-down shirt he’s worn in all of his political ads since April.
“Americans are tired of it. They’re tired of corrupt Washington elites,” he says. The ad cuts to someone lighting a match. “Let’s burn down the Washington political machine,” (Rand Paul’s campaign slogan is “defeat the Washington machine”), “and rebuild this country.”
“No more leading from behind,” he adds (repeating the words of an Obama adviser often cited by Republicans as evidence of Obama’s incompetency). “It’s time for America to win again” (basically Donald Trump’s entire campaign platform).
Frequent viewers of Huckabee ads may also notice that the other people shown in “Strip Club” look very familiar. That’s because they have starred in Huckabee ads before.
At one point a slight, older blond woman in a black dress stares off into the distance, an American flag waving gracefully behind her. Huck rudely doesn’t introduce her, but her name is Linda Gubitosi and back in April, she starred in a Huckabee ad called “Maximum Wage.”
Later, a mustached, 10-gallon hat-wearing man walks through the frame. Huck doesn’t introduce him, either, but you might recognize him as Lloyd Huggins, the star of another April ad, “Feed, Fuel, Fight.”
Maybe Huckabee isn’t hapless. Maybe by releasing this ad, proving he’s never been to a sinful house of sex and apparently uses ads comprised entirely of recycled footage, he was attempting to prove that he really is the most conservative candidate in the race.
