If I were to pick the one moment when it was absolutely clear that Mike Huckabee has no idea what he’s talking about on matters of foreign policy, it’d be Dec. 4, when he seriously flubbed a question about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.
A few days later, on MSNBC, Huckabee tried to rationalize his ignorance, saying, “It is a situation where a report was released at 10:00 in the morning, the president hadn’t seen it in four years and I’m supposed to see it four hours later.”
That, of course, was utter nonsense, and actually made Huckabee look worse. (Indeed, Huckabee went on to describe the NIE question as a “gotcha question.” Got that? If a reporter asks a leading presidential candidate about a massive intelligence report about nuclear weapons and a leading U.S. foe, it’s a “gotcha question.” By that standard, isn’t every question a gotcha question?)
What’s even more striking is that, nearly a month later, Huckabee is still struggling to explain how he could have screwed this up. Here he is talking to Time magazine (via TP):
TIME: A lot of these little tiny things that have come up, the foreign policy slip-ups, including the NIE from a few weeks back, how much of it is a result of not having the back room staff that some of the other campaigns have?
HUCKABEE: A lot of it is the result of us campaigning 20 hours a day. I mean, you know, we had to just scratch and scrape for every inch of the territory that we got. So much of it was that we literally were having to just do as many events as possible. Now we are able to be a little more disciplined and focused on the events that we do.
That particular day [when the NIE came out], which I thought it was a little bit ridiculous to talk about, the report came out at 10 in the morning and it was like five in afternoon.
Look, this is just silly.
The report was released on Monday morning. Huckabee was asked about it on Tuesday night. In between, the report was the single biggest news story in the world, on the front page of every newspaper, and the lead story in every news broadcast. Huckabee had no idea.
In reality, more than 30 hours transpired between the NIE’s release and Huckabee’s comments about it. Not “four,” not “10.” This dissembling only makes matters worse.
Indeed, the rest of Huckabee’s response to Time was fairly reasonable, given the circumstances.
“Most of the reporters in that room had been with me all day. They knew where I was. And they knew that there hadn’t really been an opportunity for a whole lot of discussion. We learned an important lesson: Don’t make any assumptions. So we are being much more careful now. If there is some breaking news, I am being pulled out of events to be sure that I know what may be happening. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known, because I simply wasn’t taking a break to go to the bathroom.”
It’s still bizarre to think Huckabee could go 30 hours without knowing about the NIE, but fine, he’s busy.
Why, then, mess with the nonsense?