Former GOP primary candidate Mike Huckabee has a new book out where he talks about his 2008 bid for the Republican nomination, as well as his thoughts on the future of his party. But that’s not what the media sees as the highlights of his book. Apparently beneath the book jacket is a lot of sneering at former rival Mitt Romney:
Mike Huckabee is using his new book, out this week, to settle a few scores, not the least of which is with his fierce primary rival, Mitt Romney.Per Michael Scherer, Huckabee picks up where he left off earlier this year, tweaking Romney as a rich guy and firing what may be the first shots of the 2012 primary.
Romney, Huckabee, writes, was “anything but conservative until he changed the light bulbs in his chandelier in time to run for president.”
At another point, Huckabee portrays a Romney proposal to encourage more investment in the market as, “Let them eat stocks!”
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There are 15 different Romney references in the book’s index, more than any of Huckabee’s other GOP rivals. The former Massachusetts governor’s name appears on at least 25 seperate pages.
Even in the Acknowledgments, Huckabee works in a reference to his former (and perhaps future) competitor in a paragraph otherwise devoted to praising his dogs.
Discussing a Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Toby, Huckabee writes: “We needed another dog about as much as we needed Mitt Romney to spend another $100 million, but he turned out to be a real blessing (Toby, that is).”
Despite the fact that we just got out of an endlessly long presidential campaign, there’s no sign that the GOP is taking a breather. In a hurry to redefine their brand and start rebuilding their broken party, there are already reports that the likely 2012 contenders are heading to Iowa soon to plant their primary seeds. Romney’s response to Huckabee’s fuss was pretty telling:
A spokesman for Romney today dismissed Huckabee’s comments in the book as “petty stuff.”
“We need to focus on moving the party forward with new ideas,” Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom told the Associated Press. “Unfortunately, Mike Huckabee seems more interested in settling scores than bringing people together.”
Sounds like a response put out in the heat of a campaign. I think we’re already in 2012 mode.
Democrats, meeting in the Capitol this morning, voted secretly to allow Lieberman to keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — despite his support for John McCain and criticism of Barack Obama during the presidential race.
Lieberman’s punishment for what many Democrats saw as an unacceptable betrayal: He will lose his seat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, where he has been an outspoken critic of Bush administration global warming policies.
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Lieberman also retained his chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee Airland subcommittee.
So let me get this straight – Lieberman spent the entire campaign standing alongside John McCain and Sarah Palin while they accused Obama of being a “socialist ” and “palling around with terrorists” and even himself went so far as to question Obama’s patriotism and suggest that he may be a Marxist, but that’s OK for the Senate Dems? Oh, and the right way to exact revenge is to strip him of chairmanships where he actually agrees with the Dems, but to let him keep Homeland Security/Gov’t Affairs, where he’s been a cheerleader for the war in Iraq and has refused to investigate President Bush’s handling of Katrina? Sure, it helps to have his vote in caucus, but at what price? I think there was a right way to go about reprimanding Joe, and once again the spineless Dems blew it. They should’ve taken his chairmanship away and let him bolt to the Republican caucus; by 2012 he would have been out of a job anyway.
This kind of behavior is not what the American people voted for on November 4. When Senate Dems will learn to stand up with some backbone – I’m not so sure.
When Newt says that “the radicals lost the vote in California,” keep in mind that he’s referring to 48% of Californians who voted against the measure – a little under 6 million people. As much as he wants to drum up fears about those “radical gays” who threaten to paint the Bible with rainbows, the notion of allowing gay couples the right to marry isn’t as radical as he and others may want Bill O’Reilly’s viewers to believe. This isn’t a fringe movement by any measure:
On Hardball today, we got to see the beginnings of a GOP at war with itself in its post-election identity crisis:
The young, non-white guy (or gal) tries to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party, and the old, white guard, still stuck in the culture wars of the 20th century, pushes back hard. I personally don’t mind seeing this kind of infighting continuing among the GOP for a long time, and not just because it provides a great source of entertainment. If the likes of Pat Buchanan and Sarah Palin continue to hold onto the reigns of the party, the next few election cycles are going to look very good for the Democrats, who have learned to (gasp) run on issues that voters care about.
GRABEL: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.
BUSH: I have made a lot of decisions, and some of them little, like appointments to boards you never heard of, and some of them big.
And in a war, there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have made that decision. And I’ll take responsibility for them. I’m human.
But on the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I’ll stand by those decisions, because I think they’re right.
That’s really what you’re — when they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re trying to say, “Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?” And the answer is, “Absolutely not.” It was the right decision.
Bush did say he had some regrets about his presidency, including “saying some things I shouldn’t have said.”
Asked for an example, the president said, “Like, dead or alive, bring them on,” which he said about the insurgents in Iraq.
“I was trying to convey a message. I probably could have conveyed it more artfully,” said Bush, who was interviewed aboard the USS Intrepid docked in New York for a Veterans Day observance.
“Being on this ship reminds me of when I went to the USS Abraham Lincoln and they had a sign that said ‘Mission Accomplished.’ I regret that that sign was there,” Bush added.
Wait a second, didn’t “Bring ‘em on” and “Mission Accomplished” happen well before the 2004 presidential election? Today’s CNN interview just serves as an uncomfortable reminder of the Bush years and all that they have entailed: a complete lack of competent governance and an unwillingness to understand the complexities of the dangerous world that we live in. If anything, this long-awaited-for expression of regret by the current President, while fully welcomed, is a slap in the face to those like John Kerry who were expressing their dissent against our Iraq policy back when it wasn’t popular to do so. I’m so glad we’re 70 days away from the final end to this national nightmare.
In what’s shaping up to be a major year of realignment in American politics, there’s been a lot of talk recently about who’s going to grab the reigns of the Republican Party after the GOP suffers what could be a crushing defeat up and down the ballot next Tuesday. According to a poll of leading voices of the blogosphere conducted by the website PoliticsHome.com, the GOP’s savior could very well be Lousiana governor Bobby Jindal. Ever since he won the governorship in Louisiana, I’ve wondered what Bobby Jindal’s plans are for his political future. He was circulated widely as a potential running mate for McCain; he even won the liking of Rush Limbaugh, who had Jindal as his preferred VP pick. He’s built up a reputation for himself (rightly or not) as more of a reformer than a true conservative partisan. And as a second generation Indian-American, Jindal must view himself as the likeliest of a small handful of current Indian-American politicians to represent his demographic for the first time on national stage, an honor that can be motivating in and of itself. So there’s no doubt that he’s taking his position very seriously down there in Louisiana. While I wouldn’t bet that he’ll be in the running in 2012, I wouldn’t for a second ignore the potential of a Bobby Jindal primary candidacy. I’d first be interested in seeing how the post-Nov. 4 infighting plays out in the GOP. There will be a struggle at capturing the heart and soul of the Republican Party, and it’s going to be an ugly battle between the theocons and Georgetown cocktail conservatives. I suspect that Jindal has a good shot at making himself known in this fight. As a Rhodes scholar, he’s extremely intelligent, and combined with his conservative credentials, he can approach the party with a Gingrich-like appeal and argue that the GOP has lost its way and needs to reinvigorate itself with new, bold ideas without compromising its core values, just as he did in Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. If I were a Democratic strategist, I would start drafting out plans now to pre-emptively stop a not-so-unimaginable Jindal run for the presidency.
