Among the reasons why Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was selected to deliver the Republican rebuttal to Democrat President Joe Biden’s Feb. 7 State of the Union address is because, at 40, she’s the nation’s youngest governor while, at 80, Biden is the oldest president in the history of the United States.
But Sanders, in her combative 15-minute response, said age isn’t the only difference between the two. In a searing juxtaposition, she said the vision offered by a “new generation of Republican leadership” of America today and tomorrow is vastly different from that presented by Biden and the Democratic Party.
“The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal and crazy,” she said, noting that “Americans want common sense leadership” while in Washington, “the Biden administration is doubling down on crazy.”
“Tonight, let us reaffirm our commitment to a timeless American idea: that government exists not to rule the people, but to serve the people. Democrats want to rule us with more government control, but that is not who we are,” she said.
Sanders said she’s a vanguard of that “new Republican leadership,” while Biden is “too weak” to stand up to progressives who control the Democratic Party.
“His administration has been completely hijacked by the radical left, by a woke mob who can’t even tell what a woman is,” she said. Biden wants “to rule with more control. That is not who we are. I am for freedom; he is for more control.”
Sanders, elected as Arkansas’s first female governor in November 2022 and sworn into office in January, is the daughter of former three-term Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and served as former President Donald Trump’s press secretary for 2 1/2 years.
She said during Trump’s administration, the United States was energy independent, the economy was robust, and the “world was at peace.”
Now, Americans are contending with empty grocery store shelves, high energy prices, rising crime, “children taught to hate one another” because of their race, and a world that appears to be increasingly spiraling toward war, Sanders said.
“In the last two years, Democrats destroyed it all,” she said.
By John Haughey
