Mike Huckabee

Tom Tancredo may not be many people’s cup of tea (as his campaign performance showed) but his take on the GOP primary results are interesting.

It was the Huckabee factor. [Former Arkansas] Governor [Mike] Huckabee decided to stay in even though he could not have won. He absolutely made a difference, and he knew it, and that difference was he was able to keep Mitt Romney out of the play by draining off conservative votes. And I think he did it to a large extent because Mitt is a Mormon. It was really to ruin Romney’s chances. So that created the pathway for Senator McCain.

I am certainly annoyed. I believe that Romney would have made a great candidate and a great president. John McCain is a better choice than Barack Obama, but I just hate the idea of voting for the lesser of two evils. But that’s what it boils down to.

Huckabee was still campaigning against Romney until last week just to make sure he didn’t get the VP nod. Was he merely reminding McCain that Romney’s Mormonism would have hurt him in the South?

While still campaigning against Mitt Romney as VP, Mike Huckabee took to the Rush Limbaugh show to deny he’s anti-Mormon.

RUSH: Thank you. So are you, sir. Now let’s get right to the chase here. I said something a couple weeks ago, maybe ten days ago, about you and Governor Romney that you strenuously objected to. What was it that I said that was incorrect?

HUCKABEE: Well, that I had made an issue out of his religion and had sort of poisoned him with evangelicals and that’s simply not true. You know, one of the things that I’ve been very adamant about is that I don’t think his religion has one thing to do with whether people should support him. Some of my favorite public servants in America happen to be the same religion he is, the Morman religion. That would be people like Mike Leavitt, Orrin Hatch, Jon Huntsman, the current governor of Utah. Great people. It has nothing to do with it.

RUSH: Yeah, but they’re not running for president nor running against you for the nomination. I guess I track this back to at one point you talking about what Romney believes, that Christ and Lucifer were brothers.

HUCKABEE: It was a question that I actually asked of the New York Times Magazine writer, because he knew a lot more about Mormonism than I did. It appeared as 11 words in about a 10,000-word story, and that got all the play. I personally apologized to Mitt because it did come across wrong and it’s simply not the way I feel and it isn’t, and I don’t think Mitt Romney’s religion has a thing to do with it. I think, you know, a record has to do with it, but not his religion. And frankly, my attitude is, the primary’s over, we need to get behind John McCain, support him, He’s our best chance, right now, our only chance to beat Barack Obama, and Barack Obama will destroy small business, his plans for higher taxes would be abominable, and his absolutely frankly deplorable view about when life begins is nothing short of frightening.

Not sure what he’s responding to, but Mike Huckabee doesn’t want the GOP to demonize Obama. He didn’t have a problem doing it quite literally to Romney and other Mormons.

Top ten religious blunders of campain 2008.  So far.

Romney was the victim of one, while Obama, Clinton, McCain and Hucakbee made the biggest mistakes all on their own.

10. Mitt Romney is asked if he believes “every word” of the Bible

And this doesn’t include Obama’s weekend  invocation of the Sermon on the Mount to support civil unions.

[via Spiritual Politics]

Evangelical backlash for not embracing Romney?

This is commonly known as being hoisted by one’s own petard. The problem the Religious Right had in this primary was the hang-up over religion, which their movement had avoided for most of its period of influence. In the end, their leaders couldn’t see past religion to policy, and that left Romney twisting in the wind . . .

When they finally engaged with Romney, they liked his agenda and his ability to organize. Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani, but most evangelical leaders lined up behind Romney, but refused to support Romney rather than just attack everyone else. They could not bring themselves to explain why Romney’s Mormonism shouldn’t matter, and indeed emphasized their analysis of it as a non-Christian religion, something Mormons hotly dispute. They lost sight of the political agenda and instead got tripped by their doctrinal agenda.

Depending on how the McCain campaign goes, it will be interesting to see if resentment towards Evangelicals builds.

“Huckabee: Perceived anti-LDS comment taken out of context, misunderstood”

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says it is “unfounded” for anyone to say he has alienated the Mormon community or that he used rival Mitt Romney’s LDS faith as a wedge issue.

Try explaining that to the reddest state of the untion which would prefer Obama to Huckabee 58 to 42 in a head to head to race.

It’s good that Huckabee can’t escape (yet) what may be his legacy of the 2008 campaign.  But in the end it may be best for the rest of us to move on.

Huckabee ran television spots in Iowa calling himself a “Christian leader,” and refused to say whether he thought the LDS Church was a cult, referring that question instead to Romney. Kirk Jowers, director of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute for Politics and a Romney friend and supporter, said he wonders whether Huckabee’s response Tuesday was “revisionist history.
  “[But] I’m very happy to hear him say that,” Jowers said. “And I suppose the best thing to do is accept him at his word. However, his approach to Romney’s religion seemed very different in the days leading up to Iowa.”

“Should Mormons Hate Huckabee?” The answer is no, but Romney supporters (not the same thing) have reason to not like his campaign. 

Huckabee’s success wasn’t entirely unrelated to Romney’s Mormonism but has also been a result of his relentless personal attacks and use of class warfare against Romney.  It’s hard to believe McCain reaching the nomination without Huckabee running as the spoiler. 

Eric James Stone: I Voted for Mitt Romney.  Eric and I agree exactly on the candidates. I don’t get to vote until next week.  Hopefully, it will still matter.

The Politico: “Utah’s Mormons loathe Huckabee.” He can’t get past the perception that he has exploited anti-Mormonism to woo Evangelicals.

Quin Monson, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University, says many observers believe that “evangelicals have rejected Romney, and that Huckabee is aiding and abetting that. … He’s egging it on.”

Yeah, but they REALLY don’t like him, and actually have a soft spot for Barack Obama (emphasis mine):

In the deeply red state where President Bush still maintains some of his highest approval ratings, a place that has ranked as the most Republican state in the nation in six of the past eight presidential elections, a BYU poll released Monday reveals that Huckabee would pull off the seemingly impossible.

As GOP nominee, he would lose the state of Utah in a hypothetical matchup with Democrat Barack Obama, 58 percent to 42 percent.

Romney, by contrast, would defeat Obama 69 percent to 31 percent. McCain would also win against Obama, though by a more modest 55 percent to 45 percent.

Still, there are limits to how much Utah dislikes Huckabee: In a head-to-head matchup with Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, Huckabee wins handily, 60 percent to 41 percent.

The ‘I Hate Romney’ Club.  It just doesn’t appear that the other campaigns hate Romney, they have been colluding behind the scenes as well. 

To be sure, the candidates’ staffs do seem to have bonded in their dislike of Romney. “It was very common for e-mails to be flying around between the Thompson, McCain and Giuliani campaigns,” says the former Thompson staffer, “Saying, ‘No matter what happens with us, we all need to make sure it’s not him.’” The staffer says that campaigns would share opposition research on Romney and offer each other tips on how best to undermine him: “Like, ‘Hey, I saw you hit Mitt on immigration — have you thought about going after him on this issue?” In some cases, the attitude even extends to the top of the campaigns. The night of the Iowa caucuses, after getting a congratulatory call from McCain, Huckabee told the candidate, according to aides: “Now it’s your turn to kick his butt.” . . .

But such jibes mask more substantive complaints that many of the candidates have about Romney. “What Romney has done,” says a Huckabee adviser, “he’s attacked people for positions he once held. That annoys people. And he uses his own money to do it, which rubs it in.” He’s gone after McCain on campaign finance reform (which he once supported), Huckabee on tax increases (Huckabee countered that Romney’s raised “fees” amounted to the same thing), and nearly all the candidates on immigration.

Of course, McCain and Huckabee have similarly “evolved” on issues and seem downright jealous that they don’t have his personal fortune or fundraising success.

Is Huckabee hanging on to help McCain? Perhaps too conspiratorial, but it seems increasingly unlikely that he can expand his appeal beyond Evangelicals.   And it certainly serves McCain to keep dividing conservatives as they  go into the GOP-only Florida primary.

The former Arkansas governor threw air kisses on primary night to winner John McCain, praising him for “running a civil and a good and a decent campaign.” . . .

But as long as Huckabee is campaigning vigorously, he is likely to draw a sizable bloc of social conservatives — and deny former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney the direct one-on-one contest he is hoping for against McCain.

Huckabee did not mention Romney in his concession statement Saturday. But Huckabee and his aides have barely disguised their disdain for Romney, whose chameleon-like stance on issues and free-spending negative ad campaign have made him the most unpopular candidate among his GOP rivals.

“Huckabee did produce ad.”
The Deseret Morning News published a letter I wrote to the editor:

How can Lisa Riley Roche’s story (Jan. 4) credibly claim that ‘Huckabee resisted the temptation to respond in kind, instead relying on his wit and humor’?  While he hasn’t had the money to respond to Romney’s barrage of contrast ads, Huckabee did produce a negative ad, which he showed with great fanfare (and plenty of free publicity) to the national media. 

However, he claimed to maintain his ‘Christian’ identity by claiming to withdraw the ad at the last minute. But it still ran in Iowa!

Romney’s ads merely commended Huckabee’s positive qualities while challenging him on issues. Huckabee has responded with personal digs at Romney and leveraging anti-Mormon sentiment to his advantage.

David H. Sundwall
Silver Spring, Md. 

Does Huckabee wants a violent end for Romney?:  First, he joked about shooting him, and now he suggests that if he were Romney he would slit his own wrists.   Maybe those Iowa pastors should reconsider caucusing for him.

Ken “$2.52 million on Jeopardy” Jennings, says “Please stop slandering my Mormon faith.” Missing the good old days when we were ignored:

Being a Mormon was like being Canadian, or a vegetarian, or a unicyclist - it made you a bit of a conversation piece at dinner, but you didn’t come in for any lip-curling scorn.

He responds to Huckabee, O’Donnell, and Hitchens, deftly answering some of the more nasty charges in a way that Romney hasn’t (and can’t).

A change of heart?  Latterdaysainstforhuckabee.blogspot.com

Huckabee apologizes.

The Church responds to Huckabee:

Like other Christians, we believe Jesus is the divine Son of God. Satan is a fallen angel.

As the Apostle Paul wrote, God is the Father of all. That means that all beings were created by God and are His spirit children. Christ, however, was the only begotten in the flesh, and we worship Him as the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.

God-O-Meter considers moving Huckabee “up to eleven.”