In October, David Brooks, in an otherwise fawning column about Mike Huckabee, conceded that “his foreign policy thinking is thin.” That was obviously a dramatic understatement.
Earlier this month, he didn’t know what the National Intelligence Estimate was. A week later, the former governor 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.
This week, any shred of credibility Huckabee maintained on foreign policy quickly vanished. In the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, the Arkansan’s first reaction was to argue that the slaying should lead to a reevaluation of immigration policy. Of course, the assertion, like most of his comments this week, doesn’t make any sense.
Explaining statements he made suggesting that the instability in Pakistan should remind Americans to tighten security on the southern border of the United States, Mr. Huckabee said Friday that “we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities, except those immediately south of the border.”
Asked to justify the statement, he later cited a March 2006 article in The Denver Post reporting that from 2002 to 2005, Pakistanis were the most numerous non-Latin Americans caught entering the United States illegally. According to The Post, 660 Pakistanis were detained in that period.
A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, however, concluded that, over all, illegal immigrants from the Philippines, India, Korea, China and Vietnam were all far more numerous than those from Pakistan.
In a separate interview on Friday on MSNBC, Mr. Huckabee, a Republican, said that the Pakistani government “does not have enough control of those eastern borders near Afghanistan to be able go after the terrorists.” Those borders are on the western side of Pakistan, not the eastern side.
Further, he offered an Orlando crowd his “apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.”
Wait, it gets better.
His campaign explained the candidate’s ignorance.
A senior aide to Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee admitted Friday that the former Arkansas governor had “no foreign policy credentials” after his comments reacting to the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto raised questions.
During an event Friday in Pella, Iowa, Huckabee said the crisis sparked by Bhutto’s death should lead to a crackdown on illegal immigrants from Pakistan. The Huckabee official told CNN that when he said that, Huckabee was trying to turn attention away from scrutiny of his foreign policy knowledge.
How terribly odd. Huckabee is under criticism for his breathtaking confusion about foreign affairs, so he thought it was wise to make it worse, connecting the Bhutto assassination to Republican fears about immigration.
Even conservative party activists are starting to notice.
Jim Conklin, chairman of the Linn County GOP, said he’s hearing local concerns about Huckabee’s foreign policy chops.
“He doesn’t always have his facts there,” Conklin said. “He is very weak there.”
Look, I realize that Huckabee, as governor of Arkansas, didn’t have to keep up on current events overseas. As a presidential candidate, he went the better part of a year without having to make any sense on foreign policy at all, in part because he was perceived as a second-tier candidate, undeserving of tough questions.
But we’re less than a week before the Iowa caucuses, and Huckabee has taken the lead in some national polls. Is it too much to ask that he, I don’t know, start reading the newspaper in the morning? Couldn’t he at least pretend to care about what’s going on in the world?
In a recent issue of National Review, conservative Rich Lowry wrote that Huckabee is “manifestly unprepared to be president of the United States.” It appears the former governor is intent on proving Lowry right.