So Mike Huckabee. Tell us how you really feel. My goodness. The former Republican President candidate unloads on former rivals Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and on some promiment social conservative leaders. Read below from Time Magazine:
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is not the sort of politician who likes to bite his tongue. But that's just what he found himself doing in the eight months following his surprising and colorful presidential campaign.
What did he think was wrong with the Republican Party What did he think of his former primary rivals? What was the best direction for the conservative movement? To each question, he would answer only in broad strokes, refusing to get too specific or pointed. He was writing a book, he would say. It would come out after the election. He would "name names." Just wait and see.
On Tuesday, that book will arrive on store shelves, and in terms of payback, it will not disappoint. At once a memoir of his campaign, a treatise on the ills of the Republican Party and a blueprint for his own political future, Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America is filled with sharp words for his fellow Republicans who frustrated his bid for the party's nomination.
Mitt Romney, Huckabee's principal rival in Iowa, receives the roughest treatment. Huckabee writes that the former Massachusetts governor's record was "anything but conservative until he changed the light bulbs in his chandelier in time to run for president." He notes that Romney declined to make a congratulatory phone call after Huckabee beat the odds to win the Iowa caucuses, "which we took as a sign of total disrespect." He mocks Romney for suggesting, during one debate, more investment in high-yield stocks as a solution to economic woes. "Let them eat stocks!" Huckabee jokes.
His treatment of former candidate Fred Thompson, a rival who helped sink Huckabee's upstart ambitions in South Carolina, is somewhat more favorable, if only because it is less personal. Huckabee maintains that Thompson's biggest mistake was strategic: he didn't understand the need to expand the Republican Party beyond its base. "Fred Thompson never did grasp the dynamics of the race or the country, and his amazingly lackluster campaign reflected just how disconnected he was with the people, despite the anticipation and expectation that greeted his candidacy," Huckabee writes.
Many conservative Christian leaders — who never backed Huckabee, despite their holding similar stances on social issues — are spared neither the rod nor the lash. Huckabee writes of Gary Bauer, the conservative Christian leader and former presidential candidate, as having an "ever-changing reason to deny me his support." Of one private meeting with Bauer, Huckabee says, "It was like playing Whac-a-Mole at the arcade — whatever issue I addressed, another one surfaced as a 'problem' that made my candidacy unacceptable." He also accuses Bauer of putting national security before bedrock social issues like the sanctity of life and traditional marriage.
Huckabee describes other elders of the social-conservative movement, many of whom meet in private as part of an organization called the Arlington Group, as "more enamored with the process, the political strategies, and the party hierarchy than with the simple principles that had originally motivated the Founders." Later, Huckabee writes, "I lamented that so many people of faith had moved from being prophetic voices — like Naaman, confronting King David in his sin and saying, 'Though art the man!' — to being voices of patronage, and saying to those in power, 'You da' man!' "
The full story is here.
There’s no reason to look back at Huckabee’s run other than to say that if Christian leaders had gotten behind Huckabee earlier with their endorsements, rhetoric and pocketbook, he could have won South Carolina and the whole trajectory of the Republican primary might have turned out different.
But look, Huckabee’s challenge now is to take his populist, new thinking conservatism theory to the people and if he’s serious about a run in 2012, he’ll need to convince Independent and mainstream Republicans that this is the way forward. Huckabee is NOT your typical conservative. He’s not opposed to a tax increase in certain circumstances. He cares about climate change. He wants to broaden the Evangelical issues.