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No Love For Huckabee

Here it is again.  There is the idea circulating out there, it seems mainly among neoconservatives and interventionists, that Huckabee’s foreign policy is simply unacceptable.  Krauthammer: Yes, I know. I’ve left out Huckabee, whom some of my colleagues are aggressively trying to promote to the first tier. I refuse to go along. Huckabee is funny, well-spoken […]

Here it is again.  There is the idea circulating out there, it seems mainly among neoconservatives and interventionists, that Huckabee’s foreign policy is simply unacceptable.  Krauthammer:

Yes, I know. I’ve left out Huckabee, whom some of my colleagues are aggressively trying to promote to the first tier. I refuse to go along. Huckabee is funny, well-spoken and gave a preacher’s stemwinder that wowed the religious right gathering in Washington last Saturday. But whatever foreign policy he has is naive and unconvincing. In wartime, that is a disqualification for commander in chief.

Now that you’ve stopped laughing after seeing Krauthammer describe someone else‘s foreign policy as naive, I’ll continue.  He thinks Huckabee would be a good Interior Secretary.  That’s the harshest backhanded compliment I’ve seen in a while.  This is frankly bizarre.  Does Krauthammer mean to say that Mitt “It’s About Shia and Sunni” Romney is a more serious candidate than Huckabee on foreign policy?  I’d be glad to throw the lot of them out, but this rejection of Huckabee seems very odd.

Opposition is cropping up more and more now that he has become a semi-serious contender (who also still has next to no money).  John Fund at The Wall Street Journal doesn’t like his claim to be a conservative (no surprise there).

Come to think of it, Huckabee occupies some of the same foreign policy space that Candidate Bush did in 2000 in that he is a “compassionate” conservative governor with no real foreign policy experience.  Where Bush tried to play the role of a Republican realist during the campaign, Huckabee has simply adapted to the more belligerent and interventionist ideas prevalent in the party today.  Just as McCain was The Weekly Standard‘s candidate of choice in 2000, the leading candidates, all of whom are being advised by neoconservatives or interventionists, have been deemed acceptable on foreign policy.  It is that the “inexperienced” governor who seems to have at least a few foreign policy ideas that aren’t terrible, unlike his top-tier competition.  Of course, he still has many ideas that are terrible, but this is why I find it hard to understand why he is being shunned by the people who specialise in terrible foreign policy ideas.

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