Who is this masked Huckabee?
This is kind of wild. Politico.com has a blog item up just now about Mike Huckabee's appearing this morning at the Christian Science Monitor's monthly newsmaker breakfast and talking like John Edwards on economics while extolling religious tolerance, saying religous values ought to make one an environmentalist and praising Bill Clinton on foreign policy, but not George W. Bush.
Huckabee is trying to pull that magic straddle between the religious right and the swing center.
Here's what Our Boy Mike is quoted as saying: “The headlines are that the economy’s doing great. But if you go out and talk to the people who work on the floors of factories, or you talk to waitresses who are doing their second job and schoolteachers who have to work an extra job, you don’t get quite the confidence of how great the economy’s doing. There are a lot of people who are working harder than they ever worked, they’re staying at best even. But their cost of health care, their cost of fuel, their cost of college education means that no matter how hard they’ve worked, they’re not quite making it to the next level. That’s a sensitivity the president better have.”
“If you’re really going to say I’m applying my faith to the world on which I live, that has to conclude concerns about the environment, it has to include concerns about poverty and hunger. It can’t just be about abortions and same-sex marriage.”
“It’s ridiculous to think that any one political group owns God. That’s absurd.”
“We can’t ignore that there are kids every day in this country that literally don’t have enough food. And don’t have adequate drinking water. In America.”
A guy with the anti-government extremists called Club for Growth, asked to respond, sounded sickened.
“It sounds like John Edwards on his poverty tour,” executive director David Keating said.
Huckabee also had some kind words for Bill Clinton. This blog report at Politico.com said he grouped Clinton with Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan as presidents that had a “pretty darn good record of leading the country” despite lacking foreign policy experience when entering office. (Notably, he initially didn’t mention Bush in the grouping – but later said history would judge Bush “much better than his contemporaries.”)