WASHINGTON – Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee ripped the Bush administration’s war against terrorism Friday, delivering a bold speech that could establish the former Arkansas governor as the maverick among top Republican candidates and test his party’s loyalty to President Bush.
“This administration’s bunker mentality has been counterproductive both at home and abroad,” Mr. Huckabee said in opening a broad indictment of Mr. Bush’s style and policy.
His strong stand could give him the kind of maverick image that John McCain courted in 2000, which appeals to independent voters in states such as New Hampshire, where they can vote in the Republican primary.
But it also could turn off the majority of Republicans who still like Mr. Bush.
Filed under: Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback, Tancredo
In a posting last week, I looked at the Democratic contenders for president in 2008. As we head into the heart of the fall campaign leading up to the caucuses and primaries, let’s examine the Republican candidates.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican presidential hopeful, said Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., will be the Democratic Party candidate for 2008.
However, in an interview with The Washington Times, Huckabee slammed Clinton for not voting for a Senate resolution last week condemning an ad in The New York Times by the Moveon.org political group that criticized U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus’ performance as top commander in Iraq.
Clinton wasn’t among the 22 Democrats who voted in favor of condemning the attack, although on Sunday television interviews, she condemned it.
RCP: As a social conservative who recently won the Palmetto State Straw poll, how do you explain trailing candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson in South Carolina?
Mike Huckabee: Well, the numbers that you’re talking about really are reflecting two things. One is the money being spent by the candidates on paid advertisements; two is the amount of exposure they’re getting and free media because of their celebrity status. But when we go head-to-head, I end up winning. So for us it’s always been about the trajectory of momentum which for us has been upward very consistently and if you look at some of the numbers of the so-called frontrunners, they’re polling behind where they themselves were before. Ours have continued to go up, they can continue to level off or slip backwards.
One of the more remarkable and depressing aspects of the Republican presidential contest is how difficult it is for the candidates to talk realistically about Iraq. At the recent New Hampshire debate, when Mitt Romney exhaled a faint puff of skepticism about the surge’s results, John McCain jumped in to stiffen his spine. Those boys are going to white-knuckle this thing through till the end.
It was left to Ron Paul, who has virtually no support, to point out that the Iraq war is a disaster and that the GOP is destroying itself with its catastrophic war policy. Mike Huckabee shot back: “Even if we lose elections, we should not lose our honor, and that is more important than the Republican Party.”
“As far as we know, this is the first time (a presidential candidate) has done an actual live webcast of any type.”
Republican Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign charted a new path into the digital realm Monday with an event dubbed “V-Day.” The blogger-driven “Vertical Day” ends at 10 a.m. today on Huckabee’s Web site.
Filed under: Hillary Clinton
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee gets uncharacteristically angry when talking about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failure to condemn by name the billionaire backer of Moveon.org’s attack on Gen. David H. Petraeus.
“If you can’t get your lips off the backside of George Soros long enough to use those lips to say it’s wrong to declare a sitting general … guilty of treason,” the 2008 Republican presidential hopeful said, “how would you ever expect to have the support of the very military you might have to send into deadly battle?”
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Mike Huckabee kicked off Vertical Day with video web cast that included Press, Bloggers, Supporters.
To officially kick-off the special event, Huckabee will host a live web-cast for bloggers and interested media at 11 a.m. CT / 12 Noon ET.
The goal of “Vertical Day” is to focus on the issues in order to attract a large wave of potential supporters to the campaign website (www.mikehuckabee.com) over a 24-hour period. An emphasis will be placed on building new online support, energizing the campaign’s base of existing support, and identifying the people most likely to participate in the first wave of the actual get-out-the-vote efforts on the ground. Components of Vertical Day include: blog posts, video clips of Huckabee on the issues and clips of Huckabee answering questions from bloggers.
