Posted on 09/15/2014 11:00:02 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Former governor Mike Huckabee (R., Ark.) implicitly made the case against Senators Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Rand Paul (R., Ky.), or Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) serving as president during a meeting with reporters about the prospect of his own candidacy.
In a roundtable meeting this morning with journalists in Washington, D.C., Huckabee said that he would decide next year whether or not he will run for president, but he already knows he’s unlikely to support any of those freshman senators.
“If not me, I would be supportive of someone who has had executive experience and who has been a governor prior to somebody having only had legislative experience, which I think is fundamentally different in the manner in which one serves,” Huckabee said after describing what it takes to be a commander-in-chief.
“Do you have the capacity, as an executive, to look at the whole battlefield and to see all the issues in play and how they integrate with each other?” he said. “And one of the things that I learned in ten-and-a-half years of being a governor, is that you don’t get to just enjoy the issues that are most endearing to you.”
Huckabee emphasized his executive experience when laying out the case for his candidacy, should he decide to enter the race.
“I believe one thing I’d bring, if I run, is I know how to govern,” he told the group. “I don’t mean to be audacious about it, but when you govern ten-and-a-half years in a state, when I inherited a legislature that was 89 out of 100 Democrats in the house and 31 out of 35 Democrats in the senate, the most lopsided legislature in America — more than any other state, including Massachusetts or Vermont — and you still get, in every session, 90 percent plus of your legislative package passed, I think you get some experience of how do you govern.”
Huckabee denied that he was drawing distinctions between himself and Cruz; asked about Paul’s potential candidacy, he said, “It’d be best not to evaluate people that have not made a decision to run.”
Yet the winner of the 2008 Iowa caucuses kept making comments that were implicit shots at his potential rivals. For instance, when Huckabee was asked about younger Republicans’ preference for “non-interventionist” foreign policy, he didn’t hesitate to equate that with a libertarian impulse to “isolate” the United States — a characterization Paul always rejects.
“The more libertarian wing tends to be laissez-faire, ‘hey it’s not our problem, this is not our yacht, we don’t need to clean the decks,’” Huckabee said. “One fault of our party is we have not done a good job of communicating to the younger Americans that, like it or not, guys, you can’t isolate yourselves.”
Huckabee also brought the tea-party senators to mind, without mentioning them, while discussing one of the difficulties of his 2008 presidential bid.
“There was nothing guaranteed, there was no job to go back to,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was a senator, still getting my paycheck every month, still getting my health benefits — which, one of the reforms I would love to see implemented is that anybody who holds office and runs for office other than the one they are running to be reelected in would have to resign the office they currently hold in order to seek one they would like to have.”
Paul and Rubio, of course, face reelection campaigns in 2016. Rubio has said that he will not run for both the presidency and the Senate; Paul’s team is working to change a Kentucky law that would force him to run for just one federal office. Cruz will have a “job to go back to” because he isn’t up for reelection until 2018.
When asked how he could repeat his 2008 success in Iowa given the rise of Cruz, Rick Santorum (who won the caucuses in 2012), and Governor Rick Perry (R., Texas), who can also tout his executive experience, Huckabee said he can appeal to a broader electorate.
“If the party wants to nominate somebody who can be very articulate in what we’re against, I’m probably not the best guy at that, but I think that what I can articulate is what we’re for,” he said. “I don’t think you can make people fearful enough and mad enough to get elected. You may make them fearful enough and mad enough, you know, maybe to get exercised and go scream at a rally. But to get them to go vote and to vote for you, I do think you have to give them something that they believe is going to make the election result in a different direction of the government.”
Huckabee may not be tanned, but he’s ready — to throw elbows in the crowded prospective 2016 field.
Plus he is a loser to the two-time loser Romney.
Nixon, LBJ and Truman had some training as former VPs. In Nixon’s case, a full eight years. In Truman’s case, a mere few months.
I can't disagree with this, except if the only people with executive experience who are running are bloody freakin' RINOs.
All the executive experience in the world means nothing if you have no vision about where this country needs to be headed, or if the vision you do have is anything other than restoring America as a land of free markets, limited government and Constitutional law.
LBJ was the quintessential senator and the force in the senate at the time of his vice presidency.
Nixon actually had a functional presidency until the Watergate takedown. Billy Graham reveals that Nixon had a level of anti-Semitism in him, and that bothers me now. Also, after becoming a conservative, I’ve decided that Nixon, with his wage/price controls, was actually a bit of a socialist.
While Huck is definitely better than Obama (but who isn’t?), he can’t hold a candle to Cruz, or Palin, or anyone else who espouses CONSERVATIVE Values.
“Do you have the capacity, as an executive, to look at the whole battlefield and to see all the issues in play and how they integrate with each other?” he said. “And one of the things that I learned in ten-and-a-half years of being a governor, is that you don’t get to just enjoy the issues that are most endearing to you.”
He says he can articulate what "we" are for, but where does he do any of that in this article?
We haven;t had the primary yet.
Then we need a candidate who can excite the base and get out the vote. Huckster is not that guy
One President from Arkansas was one too many.
We don’t need another “Dope from Hope.”
The Arkansas GOP has moved solidly left from what I hear.
It looks like he’s running, God help us all........
If it is somehow true that the Huckster is “better than the others”, the USA is in worse shape than I thought.
Well, I'll let Huck and Santorum split the vote in Iowa that Huck had in 08 and that Santorum had in '12. It's the same vote. When they split it, they're both done early. Thank GOD!!
As Monica said, ‘we don’t need another because the last one left a bad taste in my mouth.’
True....and I'll add he cannot inspire, cannot persuade, cannot motivate anything but a teeny tiny niche of the voters. He doesn't even understand the long term magic of Cruz' filibuster - let alone have the leadership to do something similar. He's pathetic.
He creeps you out because he’s a phony - and you are not a phony - so your radar is warning you to “Stay away.....stay away.....stay away....”
And by phony, I mean certainly a phony conservative. Maybe a phony Christian, altho that’s between him and God and I would never pretend to know - I just know that the phony streak is inside of him, and I wouldn’t ever assume he’s genuine about anything. Maybe he is, but he’s yet to prove it.
If not, it SHOULD be!! :)
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