After a series of humiliating incidents, Mike Huckabee has earned his reputation for knowing less about foreign policy than any credible candidate in either party. To help address his obvious deficiency, Huckabee wrote (or, more likely, someone on his staff wrote) a piece for the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, in which he criticizes the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq. Specifically, he laments the size of the troop deployment during the initial invasion, and accuses the White House of approaching the war with an “arrogant bunker mentality,” which he described as having “been counterproductive at home and abroad.”
Assuming Huckabee read the piece, he had to realize there’d be at least some pushback. Mitt Romney was the first out of the gate.
Mitt Romney ripped into Iowa frontrunner Mike Huckabee at a town hall in Humboldt, Iowa, [yesterday] morning over an article Huckabee penned in the current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. In the article, the former Arkansas governor accused the Bush administration of having an “arrogant bunker mentality” on the world stage.
“I said, ‘Did this come from Barack Obama? Or from Hillary Clinton? Did it come from John Edwards?” Romney told the crowd of about 100 people. “No, it was one of our own. It was Governor Huckabee.”
Romney kept this up on “Meet the Press.”
“I’ve been saying for months — and I think all the Republican candidates, in fact, have been saying for months, if not years — that following the collapse of Saddam Hussein, our policy was unprepared, unplanned, understaffed, undermanaged, and that we made a number of errors and much of the difficulty we face today is due to those errors.
But it’s very different to point out the mistakes that were made. The President’s pointed out the mistakes as well. And then to say the Bush administration, our President, is arrogant with a bunker mentality — that’s a completely different statement, for which Mike Huckabee owes the President an apology.”
Oddly enough, Huckabee is already starting to back down.
TP noted that Huckabee, on CNN, characterized himself as the true Bush ally, not Romney.
“I didn’t say the President was arrogant…. I’ve said that the policies have been arrogant…. I’m the one who actually supported the President’s surge. I supported the Bush tax cuts, when Mr. Romney didn’t. I was with President Bush on gun control, when Mitt Romney wasn’t. I was with the President on the President’s pro-life position, when Mitt Romney wasn’t.”
Let’s be perfectly clear here — Huckabee and Romney are fighting over who agrees with Bush the most.
In other words, two credible challengers for the Republican presidential nomination are struggling to align themselves with the least popular president in the modern political era.
As a rule, the GOP presidential field realizes that the president’s name isn’t supposed to be uttered at all. In this week’s Republican candidate, not a single Republican hopeful used the word “Bush” over the course of the 90-minute event.
And now Huckabee and Romney are moving sharply in the other direction. Apparently, they missed the memo.