Former Arkansas governor and current Fox News personality Mike Huckabee continues to tip toe around speculation that he will run for president again in 2012.
In Huckabee’s first run for president in 2008, he did far better than many analysts predicted, winning the Iowa caucuses and coming in second in the delegate count behind eventual Republican nominee Arizona Sen. John McCain. (Huckabee came in third in the popular primary vote behind McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.)
While the host of Fox News’s weekend show “Huckabee” won’t display his cards just yet, the potential 2012 presidential candidate already has his campaign theme ready: “keep it simple.”
Peddling his recent book “A Simple Government,” Huckabee has spent much of this winter travelling the country — including six days in battleground Iowa — signing books, shaking hands and discussing his ideas for a commonsense approach to governance. For Huckabee, the key is simplicity.
“If people go back and look at the origin of the country, our founders only spent about 20 pages on the entire Constitution,” Huckabee told The Daily Caller. “The Obamacare bill is 2,300 pages. So clearly we’ve evolved from a time when our government leaders expressed things with simplicity to complexity. And it has not made us better or stronger or more secure. In fact it has created an incredible world of government and cost that are really unnecessary.”
Huckabee has worked hard to present himself as a conservative and though he has a strong Tea Party following, fiscally conservative critics point to his tenure as Arkansas governor as proof of his big-government tendencies. The Cato Institute gave the former governor a “D” on taxes for his time in office. The Club for Growth — an organization Huckabee has referred to as the “club for greed” — ran campaign ads against Huckabee during the 2008 Republican presidential primary and pointed to his 17% sales tax increase as governor as a reason not to vote for him. According to Americans for Tax Reform, state spending increased by 65 percent during his first 8 years in office.
Huckabee dismisses the concerns of his critics and since leaving the governor’s mansion has worked to highlight his fiscally conservative bonafides. In 2007, Huckabee signed Americans for Tax Reform’s pledge to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses … and oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.”
In recent years, he has embraced the FairTax and advocated for “personalized” (i.e. privatized) social security accounts, a higher retirement age, and a market-based voucher system for health care.
“The problem with any income tax is you’re penalizing productivity,” he said, explaining why he supports a tax on consumption. “Work, saving, investments, risking capital — that’s how jobs are created and the economy is strengthened. But if you tax all of those things then you’re punishing what you ought to be rewarding.”
As a former Southern Baptist preacher, Huckabee is a star with social conservatives and while some of his possible primary opponents say the real fight this year is over economics, not social issues, Huckabee contends social issues are economic issues.
“The fathers are biological fathers but not the social parents – we end up with taxpayers spending $300 billion a year to in essence be the daddies that the fathers weren’t. I thought about the fact that 2/3 of the women who are living in poverty – the children wouldn’t be [living in poverty] if their mothers were married to the fathers of those kids,” Huckabee said, explaining the problem of single motherhood and the welfare state.
“Social policy and the breakdown of a family is quantified into economic pain that the taxpayer feels,” he said.
Huckabee is steadfast in his commitment to conservative social values but he is not without his critics on even those issues. Some of these critics have distilled his softer positions on certain social problems as emanating from the compassion he derives from his faith — notably pushing to get in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants and pardoning or reducing 1,033 prison sentences (which according to the Washington Post was more than double the number of his three predecessors). Compounding that criticism was his decision to release serial rapist and murderer Wayne Dumond, who after his release went on to rape and murder at least one other woman.
“I always liked Huckabee. I was one of those who voted for him until he started letting murderers and rapists out,” Dee Engle, a representative from the Central Arkansas chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, told the Washington Post.
In the foreign policy realm, Huckabee is a passionate defender of Israel. Having visited the country 15 times, Huckabee believes America should support the embattled Jewish state at all costs and even adopt some of the country’s policies to solve some of America’s problems.
“When I heard people say the Israelis need to make peace, that hasn’t worked out at all. And every time the Israelis have given up land they have gotten less land and less peace. So I believe the Israelis ought to be encouraged to build where ever they would like to,” he said, criticizing the push by some politicians to pressure Israel to stop building settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
“The U.S. government under the Obama administration and to some degree the Bush administration has put more pressure on Israel to quit building bedrooms for its own families than on Iran to quit building bombs that would destroy half the world. It doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.
As Huckabee determines whether or not he should make a run, recent polls could be a strong inducement to enter the fray. According to a February Newsweek/Daily Beast poll, Huckabee performs the best against Obama of the possible Republican contenders tested, tying the president in a head-to-head matchup. In a recent Winthrop survey, Huckabee leads his Republican competition with 22 percent of likely primary voters in 11 Southern states and holds the likely primary voter majority in Iowa. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey released earlier this month, Huckabee leads the pack of possible Republican contenders with 25 percent support.
While he still won’t commit to saying he is running, pundits have advised that people watch the formerly obese governor’s waistline for clues as to whether he will get in or not.
Huckabee recently told TheDC that, after having fallen off his diet and putting on a few pounds in recent months, he is working on getting back on track. Whether this is for purely health reasons or to get in campaign shape remains to be seen.