Thread: GOPUSA Poll, Which candidate has the best chance 2008

Which candidate has the best chance of winning the 2008 Republican presidential nomination?
Sam Brownback
-- 7%

Bill Frist
-- 0%

Newt Gingrich
-- 19%

Rudy Giuliani
-- 11%

Chuck Hagel
-- 0%

Mike Huckabee
-- 1%

Duncan Hunter
-- 16%

John McCain
-- 6%

George Pataki
-- 0%

Condoleezza Rice
-- 5%

Mitt Romney
-- 11%

Tom Tancredo
-- 8%

Other
-- 10%

Total Votes: 12820

StokeyBob wrote:

Come on Tancredo people!

Let Duncan Hunter be your Huckleberry!

For those of you confused by my use of the word Huckleberry:

[Q] From Cristlyn Randazzo: “What is the origin of the expression ‘I’ll be your Huckleberry’? What exactly does it mean?”

[A] What it means is easy enough. To be one’s huckleberry — usually as the phrase I’m your huckleberry — is to be just the right person for a given job, or a willing executor of some commission. Where it comes from needs a bit more explaining.

First a bit of botanical history. When European settlers arrived in the New World, they found several plants that provided small, dark-coloured sweet berries. They reminded them of the English bilberry and similar fruits and they gave them one of the dialect terms they knew for them, hurtleberry, whose origin is unknown (though some say it has something to do with hurt, from the bruised colour of the berries; a related British dialect form is whortleberry). Very early on — at the latest 1670 — this was corrupted to huckleberry.

As huckleberries are small, dark and rather insignificant, in the early part of the nineteenth century the word became a synonym for something humble or minor, or a tiny amount. An example from 1832: “He was within a huckleberry of being smothered to death”. Later on it came to mean somebody inconsequential. Mark Twain borrowed some aspects of these ideas to name his famous character, Huckleberry Finn. His idea, as he told an interviewer in 1895, was to establish that he was a boy “of lower extraction or degree” than Tom Sawyer.

Also around the 1830s, we see the same idea of something small being elaborated and bombasted in the way so typical of the period to make the comparison a huckleberry to a persimmon, the persimmon being so much larger that it immediately establishes the image of something tiny against something substantial. There’s also a huckleberry over one’s persimmon, something just a little bit beyond one’s reach or abilities; an example is in David Crockett: His Life and Adventures by John S C Abbott, of 1874: “This was a hard business on me, for I could just barely write my own name. But to do this, and write the warrants too, was at least a huckleberry over my persimmon”.

Quite how I’m your huckleberry came out of all that with the sense of the man for the job isn’t obvious. It seems that the word came to be given as a mark of affection or comradeship to one’s partner or sidekick. There is often an identification of oneself as a willing helper or assistant about it, as here in True to Himself, by Edward Stratemeyer, dated 1900: “ ‘I will pay you for whatever you do for me.’ ‘Then I’m your huckleberry. Who are you and what do you want to know?’ ”. Despite the obvious associations, it doesn’t seem to derive directly from Mark Twain’s books.

Short question, long answer!

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-huc1.htm

Rep. Tancredo is probably the best thing that has ever happend for our cause, but unfortunately I don't believe he's as electable as Rep. Hunter. Of course I've been wrong before.

MW,

It sounds like we have at least two good men in the running.

Things are looking up. I've never been so interested, so early on, in an election before. The stakes are high now.

It may be all up to us this time and we have no real excuse for not getting an even start.

I'll be watching your Huckleberry. Both men seem to be the kind of men that will not let us stay split up until it is detrimental to our mutual goals.

May the best man win.


StokeyBob

P.S. Good Huckleberry story by the way. I have heard the term before and wondered what it meant.