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"It Just Exploded on Us"Mike Huckabee explains why he's surging.

By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007, at 8:14 PM ET

(Continued from page 2)

Slate: What issue are you talking about that isn't getting covered?

Huckabee: One thing I hope for [is that] more information will come out [about the] Law of the Sea treaty, which some people have called the U.N. on steroids. It does have some damaging and dangerous implications for our national sovereignty. I'm hoping that more of the American people would realize it would be a terrible mistake to ratify that treaty as it's written.

Slate: You talk about the need for arts education in school. Why? And how have you benefited from being a musician?

Huckabee: The discipline that one learns from it is important, but also the stimulation and creativity. If an education system is only left-brain and it does not properly stimulate the right brain, then it's no small wonder why students are bored to the point of quitting. We lose 6,000 kids a day to drop-out. A third of students in our public schools will drop out of school. It's not because these kids are dumb. They are bored. What music and the arts do is make sure that those who are right-brain oriented have their lives touched as much as kids who are logic-centered. It's our creativity that becomes our cultural vehicle and gives us continuity between one generation and the next. Without that continuity, we not only lose some songs or artwork, we lose our capacity to transmit our culture.

Slate: Who is your favorite musician whose politics you disagree with the most?

Huckabee: I love John Mellencamp's music. I think he may be on a different page politically. There are a lot of musicians whose politics I don't agree with. But there's no crying in baseball, and no politics in music.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Mike Huckabee by Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images.
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