Clearly, the big news from Zev Chafets’ NYT piece on Mike Huckabee, to be published on Sunday in the Times’ Magazine, was the former governor’s suggestion that Mormons believe Jesus and the devil are brothers. But that’s not the only noteworthy tidbit in the article.
A friend of mine emailed me about this interesting tidbit:
At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy. This is like taking travel advice from Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, but the governor seemed unaware of the incongruity.
When I pressed him, he mentioned he had once “visited” with Richard Haass, the middle-of-the-road president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Huckabee has no military experience beyond commanding the Arkansas National Guard, but he doesn’t see this as an insuperable problem. “What you do,” he explained, “is surround yourself with the best possible advice.” The only name he mentioned was Representative Duncan Hunter of California. “Duncan is extraordinarily well qualified to be secretary of Defense,” he said.
In October, David Brooks, in an otherwise fawning column about Huckabee, conceded that “his foreign policy thinking is thin.” That was obviously a dramatic understatement — Huckabee’s understanding about international affairs is about as sophisticated as his child-like familiarity with energy policy.
Last week, he didn’t know what the National Intelligence Estimate was. This week, he identified Thomas Friedman and Frank Gaffney as his biggest influences on foreign policy, despite the fact that Friedman and Gaffney don’t actually agree on anything.
That Huckabee is a credible challenger for the GOP nomination at all suggests the party has pretty much given up on taking foreign-policy knowledge seriously as a presidential qualification.
Kevin Drum referred to Huckabee last night as the “village idiot” on a point unrelated to international affairs.
[W]ill anyone press him on this? Or will he get the village idiot treatment that Republicans since Ronald Reagan have so often gotten, where they’re sort of expected to say harebrained stuff and nobody holds it against them? After all, this has nothing to do with Huckabee’s hair, his cleavage, or his middle name, only with the fact that he displays an almost comical, grade-school ignorance of even the bare basics of national energy policy. And who cares about that in a president of the United States?
I’m genuinely curious about this. George W. Bush showed a similar sophistication when it came to current events and policy basics in 2000, and the political press corps more or less laughed it off, as if intelligence was no longer relevant in a national leader.
With Huckabee, it’s happening all over again — a southern governor who doesn’t know anything about policy is running on his charm, his religion, and his appeal to far-right activists. Political reporters thought it would be rude (or, more accurately, biased) to emphasize the candidate’s lack of intellectual prowess, and we’ve been paying a high price ever since.
I’ve seen this movie before, and I really don’t like the ending.
Post Script: By the way, speaking of Huckabee and foreign policy, Patrick Ruffini asked yesterday, “Is the national security party really going to [nominate] a former governor with zero national security experience to face al-Qaeda?”
Of course, he recommended that this tilts the scales in the direction of Rudy Giuliani, who has zero national security experience. Just thought I’d mention it.