Former Governor Mike Huckabee is throwing his hat into the ring again. His On the Issues Quiz answers strike me as a doctrinaire hard line conservative:
The one exception might be his opposition to free trade.
Ballotpedia notes he had the computers in his office destroyed before he left the governorship of Arkansas.
Steve Benen feels a little ill concerning Mike’s activities between public service gigs:
How sketchy? Huckabee’s [e-mail] list has been used to “blast out links to heart-disease fixes and can’t-miss annuities.” And this isn’t just some unfortunate part of his distant past – as recently as this year Huckabee was still sending his mailing list bizarre messages “about food hoarding.”
To be sure, Huckabee isn’t directly responsible for the often ridiculous messages, but these email addresses have gone out under his name and face, giving the appearance of an endorsement.But let’s also not overlook the fact that Huckabee’s lucrative snake-oil operation isn’t limited to unfortunate uses of email addresses. Just two months ago, Huckabee also appeared in an infomercial-like video in which he touted an “amazing” treatment that can “reverse” Type 2 diabetes.
The Council on Foreign Relations notes that he seems fixated on Islamism and, in fact, says virtually nothing about the rest of the world:
But it’s the nature of modern presidential campaigning that candidates eventually have to stake a flag on foreign policy. Huckabee laid out his vision of “America’s Priorities in the War on Terror” in a Foreign Affairs article. He also took positions on issues such as democracy promotion in the Arab world, Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Russia, and climate change, though he said little or nothing about places like Africa, India, and North Korea. …
How would Huckabee defeat violent Islamic extremists? He has not laid out a specific blueprint, but in a recently released ad, he strongly implied that the answer was force.When you’re dealing with Islamic jihad, that has as its goal the annihilation of everyone who does not agree with their absolute religious fanaticism, you’re dealing with a rattlesnake…As a kid growing up in south Arkansas, one thing I learned about rattlesnakes, you don’t try to get in their head and figure out why they want to bite you. You don’t try to have a conversation with them. You don’t negotiate with them. You sure as heck don’t feed them. You take their heads off with a four ten shotgun or a hoe before they bite you—because the one thing that you can be sure of is that snake will bite you if he can.
Huckabee has yet to explain why his envisioned use of force would be more successful than George W. Bush’s or Barack Obama’s.
The folks at the Advocate.com find little to like:
“It is a classic example of — really a page out of 1984, when what things mean are the opposite of what they really are,” Huckabee told the Family Research Council president in early April, referring to the George Orwell novel about a dystopian future. “And that’s what I’m seeing here is that in the name of tolerance, there’s intolerance. In the name of diversity, there’s uniformity. In the name of acceptance, there’s true discrimination.”
He claimed that “intolerance” of Christians “won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel, and I’m talking now about the unabridged, unapologetic Gospel that is really God’s truth.”
National Review notes he may have some tough sledding in portions of the course lorded over by the anti-tax folks:
[and] … the tax increases he didn’t protest as governor, have earned him the enmity of the behemoth of conservative outside groups, such as the Club for Growth, whose president has promised the group “will make sure that Republican primary voters thoroughly examine his exceptionally poor record of raising taxes and spending as governor.”
But, if you accept that the average GOPer believes in torture, he has changed his ways for the better:
If Huckabee is, to some conservatives, maddeningly stubborn in his fiscal heterodoxy, he’ll be charting a different course on foreign policy than he did in 2008, an area where he struggled. Then, he called for the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and for “treat[ing] others the way you’d like to be treated” in matters of foreign affairs and diplomacy. In fact, he called that “the fundamental issue that has to be reestablished in our dealings with other countries” as the Bush presidency drew to a close. This time around, he’s sounded downright hawkish, promising to “lead with moral clarity in a dangerous world” and to “keep all the options on the table in order to defeat the evil forces of radical Islam.”
His website is here.
