How Far Mike Huckabee Has Fallen

Last updated on: August 4, 2015 at 12:27 am by Thomas Kidd

How Far Mike Huckabee Has Fallen 2015-08-03T10:30:51-04:00 Thomas Kidd

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Over at the Washington Post’s Acts of Faith blog, I have a piece on the strange decline of Mike Huckabee as a Republican presidential aspirant. I really liked Huckabee in 2008, but it has pretty much been all downhill from there. Supporting David Barton, getting his Fox News gig, and now playing the “Nazi card” on the president?

“On paper, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee should probably be the evangelical darling amid the great wash of Republican presidential candidates. Instead, he remains mired in the middle of the pack. His lack of traction can be traced in part to his ill-considered comments about the Iran deal and President Obama. The president, Huckabee said, “would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven.” Everyone in politics knows that if you have to play the Nazi card, you’re getting desperate.

Having served as a Baptist pastor in Arkansas before a decade-long tenure as the state’s governor, Huckabee in 2008 showed signs of becoming an insurgent populist candidate. He won the Iowa GOP caucuses and came in second to Sen. John McCain in the overall Republican delegate count. I myself really liked Huckabee: He had great executive experience, stronger social conservative credentials than McCain or Mitt Romney, and he deftly advocated the kind of “compassionate conservatism” that might work well in a general election.

How far Huckabee has fallen.”

Read the rest here.

As an interesting follow-up to this piece, on the day after my column WORLD Magazine released its first survey of “evangelical insiders” regarding the 2016 election. It suggests that, at least for the 100 or so evangelical leaders WORLD surveyed, some Fox News darlings such as Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and yes, Mike Huckabee, are not faring so well. Marco Rubio came out on top, followed by Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Ted Cruz. (Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission will be interviewing Rubio and Bush at an SBC conference this week.)

Of course, we can expect many changes between now and the actual election. As illustrated by Trump’s surge, the 2016 election is currently in “summer entertainment” mode.

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