Not Everyone Hearts Huckabee
A reminder: not everybody is fawning over Mike Huckabee.
The Club For Growth didn’t exactly find him to have a sterling record on economic conservatism as governor of Arkansas.
The fruit was low-hanging enough to cause even the Democrats to take a pick at it. Check out their hit piece from February where they, no kidding, call him “Tax and Spend Huckabee”. The Democrats. And both have loads of citations in their pieces if you want to look around.
The best though is this quote from an Arkansas Leader editorial last year.
“Regardless of his (Huckabee’s) rhetoric at Memphis and elsewhere in his travels, his record as a tax-and-spend, big-government politician won’t help in a party that is now captive of the far right. His personal story, unlike the prisoner-of-war John McCain’s, is not compelling: a Baptist preacher who goes into politics and melts off a hundred pounds of baby fat under medical-school supervision.”
Ouch.
Probably won’t hurt him as a Vice Presidential candidate, if that’s where he’s going, and probably won’t hurt him much as a second tier candidate either, for that matter (though I think his gloss coming out of Iowa is over-stated anyway: he and Brownback essentially split the social conservative vote, which is no great accomplishment for either of them and no great foreboding of success either, though the headlines might finally give Huckabee enough of an advantage to put Brownback away). But if it does come to a point where Huckabee is considered first tier, he does have a record, and it’s not all treadmills, guitars, and creationism.