One conservative group is wasting no time airing its grievances against Mike Huckabee, after Huckabee announced on his Fox News show Saturday that he is weighing a bid for president.
Although Huckabee is thought to have a strong claim to the conservative wing of the Republican Party should he run for president, the Club For Growth begged to differ in a statement released Monday.
“As Mike Huckabee weighs the pros and cons of a second presidential candidacy, he should know that the Club for Growth PAC will make sure that Republican primary voters thoroughly examine his exceptionally poor record of raising taxes and spending as governor,” said Club for Growth President David McIntosh. “In a year in which GOP voters appear likely to have several good pro-economic growth candidates to choose from, Mike Huckabee’s big government record would stand out from the crowd, and not in a good way.”
A former Republican member of Congress from Indiana, McIntosh is a longtime friend of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, himself a former congressman. Pence is thought to be weighing a bid for president and, were he to run, he would likely seek to appeal to the same conservatives within the party as Huckabee.
“He can see himself as president,” McIntosh said of Pence in a recent interview with the Washington Post.
But Huckabee would have an early advantage over Pence, having run for president once before and enjoying national name recognition as a result of that and his Fox News show. Pence, by contrast, is relatively unknown nationally and scored just one percent in a recent CNN/ORC poll of potential Republican presidential candidates.
