Off-key

Singing the mother tongue is harder than it looks | Joel Belz

Over lunch last week, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and I reflected on how beneficial—and how costly—a single phrase can be. It may even be why he's referred to now as a "former" presidential candidate.

The phrase came from a speech Huckabee gave last fall at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C. That's where he brought the crowd to its feet when he said: "It's important that the language of Zion is a mother tongue, and not a recently acquired second language."

Huckabee's line was a huge winner with his audience that evening, setting the stage for him to make a strategic move from being a back-row also-ran to the ranks of the "Big Three," along with John McCain and Mitt Romney, in the Republican race.