Steve Kornacki: Mike Huckabee's Favorite Holocaust Anecdote

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki

Four summers ago, Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign faced a critical moment. He had little money and no one in the national media was taking him seriously -- and it was time for the Iowa Republican Straw Poll. The stakes were high for Huckabee, who was struggling with then-Sen. Sam Brownback to emerge as the consensus choice of religious conservatives. Conventional wisdom held that Brownback had a leg up, at least. A poor showing for Huckabee would only reinforce this view, perhaps putting pressure on him to quit the race.

It was against this backdrop that Huckabee, the old Baptist preacher, delivered a rousing, emotionally powerful speech aimed straight at the hearts of the (many) cultural conservatives in the crowd. He saved abortion for the end, reminding attendees that "we are a people of life." Then he slowly launched into a story about a visit to Israel that he'd taken with his daughter when she was 11 years old. At the end of a tour of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Huckabee told the crowd:

There was a guestbook there and my daughter reached into my pocket and took the pen out of my pocket and she started writing in the guestbook her name and our address. And there was a space there for comments. And I wondered, what would my daughter -- 11 years old -- write in that space provided. I'd hoped that somehow she would understand why her mother and I left what was a comfortable life for us to get involved in something that can be as tumultuous as politics. My daughter took that pen and she wrote words that I will never forget for as long as I live. These are the words she wrote: She wrote, "Why didn't somebody do something?" And with that, she gave me the pen back. And I looked at those words and I thought: She got it. Why didn't somebody do something? And ladies and gentlemen, let it never be that someday in the future of this wonderful nation that we call home, that some father has to look over his daughter's shoulder and watch her words like that and ask the question about this country. Let it never happen that someday some father would have to hear his daughter as the question: Why didn't somebody do something?"...