… and he was actually being sensible. Crap! What has the world come to?
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee went on The Tonight Show last night. He had booked on the chance he might have committed to the Presidential race, but then decided not to run this time. So Leno asked him various questions about his decision not to run.
One of his comments was how toxic the political environment is right now. He admitted his own erroneous statement about Obama being a Kenyan was a mistatement and that his intent of the remark was that the environment one grows up in shapes a person’s thoughts and expectations. Obama spent much of his youth outside of the United States, and therefore was shaped by those experiences. But his comment was taken and spun way out of proportion to make him look like a Birther. Which he said was nonsense, and furthermore the whole issue was ridiculous and does nothing to help us solve the real problems America is facing, like the financial crisis of the debt.
I left Arkansas before Huckabee was elected, but what I heard about him I didn’t care for. But now he’s the guy on the Right who is sensible? Yikes!
Funny how different they look when they are not running. It’s the McCain effect - a Republican is acceptable in inverse proportion to his distance from the Oval Office.
When they’re not campaigning, there is more opportunity to listen to what they say, rather than what their enemies say about them. Huckabee has been saying all along that the Obama-Kenya remark was a mis-statement.
Back when I was working for a (liberal) advocacy group, the elder staffers cited the 1970s-1980s era Bob Dole as a prime example of a politician whose fundamental decency and fairness proved that conservatives and liberals could find common ground and work together.
Of course that was before Dole had presidential ambitions. I guess no one - conservative or liberal - wants to hear their candidate is willing to work with the enemy to find common ground.
I’ll bet that one of the things that made him decide not to run was his clemency for Maurice Clemmens. If you think that Willie Horton killed Dukasis’s chances for election, just wait till Huckabee tries to run with the Clemmens albatros around his neck.
As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Obama voter, Huckabee scared me. He’s a very affable and witty guy - his Tonight Show appearance sounds like his Daily Show appearances. He has actual experience governing, and as something of a centrist. His policy statements scared me, as they were what Palin would say if she could speak or write a coherent sentence. I’m relieved he’s out of the race to the White House. I think if Huckabee got the Republican nomination Obama would be in big trouble.
But Mike, bubbe, swetheart, if you did not think Obama was a Kenyan Muslim, why did you say it? Let alone on the air and for the record. You knew better.
Huckabee always struck me as a decent guy up until the Kenya thing - which was rather scuzzy even if you accept that he meant to say Indonesia. He’s usually a good interview on TV and he has more of a sense of humor about himself than most candidates, although I disagree with him about a ton of things even without bringing his evangelical leanings into it. The things I do agree with him about, or at least think he makes some sense on, are totally antithetical to where the Republican Party is right now. He had no chance to get out of the primaries as a conservative who was comfortable (on some issues) with “big government” and who was somewhat supportive of environmentalism. The party wasn’t moving his way in this electoral cycle and I doubt it’s going to move in his direction after that.
If you’re suggesting this applies to me, I haven’t been listening much to anything about Huckabee either. I’m sure he was saying that all along - he said so on the Tonight Show and I have no reason to doubt that. I was merely repeating the comments made on the show that struck me, not that I’ve followed those incidents.
