PrintJanuary 3, 2008
Huckabee - I'm NOT angry!
Mike Huckabee is pretty slick. He's the one Republican who's been boosted by the big media. Those media headlines got him off to a fast start.
But a couple of days ago he got the press laughing at his shenanigans with his "I'm NOT negative!" press conference.
"Mike Huckabee said Monday he wouldn't run a TV ad he'd prepared blistering Republican rival Mitt Romney as dishonest. Then he showed it to a room packed with reporters and cameramen."
So Huckabee is talking to a giant media fest with dozens of TV cameras, surrounded by five anti-Mitt posters. But he's very come-to-Jesus about it. You see, he's not actually going to run that negative ad on Mitt, because he's a good person. And just to show the press that he had the negative ad all ready to run, he'll tell them all the Mitt criticisms he's not going to put on TV.
"We have run it positive. We have gotten here by being positive."
Even the reporters laughed it up.
So Huckabee tried to get his negative ad out for free, and still got to claim that he was being positive. Is that slick or what? It's like the guy whose wife tells him he sounds angry, and he screams at her, "I'm NOT MAD!!"
A lot of people like Huckabee in person, but he looks like a basically angry man to me.
At his pheasant hunting press show he ended up shooting his 20-gauge shotgun over the heads of the onlookers. That's just lousy firearms safety, as any hunter knows. But Huck wasn't sorry. He said it was his way of telling Mitt Romney just "don't get in my way." The press asked him if he really meant to say that, and he just said it again. He did mean it.
You just don't do that in a presidential primary. This isn't High Noon in Dodge City. Blasting your shotgun over the heads of the press looks like an impulsive action, by a man who allows his anger to take over his judgment.
This is the same guy who's written a book called, "Kids who kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence." But he didn't set a good example by shooting off his shotgun over people's heads.
Huck's not a conservative but a populist politician, like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. "I'm out to change the Republican Party" is his way of saying it. But then he calls himself a conservative.
Huckabee isn't good on foreign policy, so he makes really basic mistakes. His advisors just say "he wasn't briefed" on things like Pakistan and the assassination of Bhutto. The trouble is that a president can't just brush up on this dangerous world when some headline story comes up. He's got to be ahead of the curve.
A US president should know that Pakistan has been at the center of the war on terror since before 9/11/01, when the Taliban sheltered Osama Bin Laden. Pakistan's intelligence service set up the Taliban in the first place. Today it looks like the same AQ-Taliban goons killed Benazir Bhutto. This can't be news to a presidential candidate.
And that's only Pakistan: What about Russia, China, the Middle East?
It's just not good enough.
America can't settle for a politician who's not up to speed, and who violates firearms safety rules to send a political message. We can't afford a politician who plays the liberal media against the conservative base.
Let's leave the slicksters to the Democrats.
We have better candidates.
James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/
