Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was the featured guest at a reporter’s breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor this morning. USA Today‘s On Deadline has the scoop on the svelte governor’s comments on the war in Iraq and fellow Republican John McCain.
Asked if fellow Republican McCain’s embrace of the increasingly unpopular war would create problems for him as a presidential nominee, Huckabee said:
“That and a Washington address probably are not strong attributes.” Would American voters elect a nominee who had supported the war so strongly? “If the wheels are coming off even more, then everything about the war is a huge problem,” he responded. If things “improve or stabilize” in Iraq, that could change.
What about Bush’s leadership of the war? The administration seemed ill-prepared to deal with the situation that followed after Saddam Hussein was ousted, he said. “There does seem to be an 18-minute gap … between the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of a stable democracy” there.
Huckabee defended his own ability to handle foreign policy as president, despite his lack of Washington experience. He praised President Ronald Reagan’s management of the end of the Cold War. What about Bush, another former governor? “I don’t think it is necessarily helpful,” he said, “but I also don’t think it’s overwhelmingly harmful. . . . I don’t think there’s an automatic transference to the next guy.”
Huckabee doesn’t have any foreign policy record, but he will surely have his own “huge problem” to deal with come the primary, mainly an “insistence on raising taxes at almost every turn throughout his final term.”
