More Huckabee

Thinking about the Huckabee business more, it seems to me that while he's getting a bum rap over the border issue, it really is the case that he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to foreign policy. Not realizing that the Iran NIE had come out is a big deal. The fact that he couldn't provide any explanation of what a Gaffney plus Tom Friedman foreign policy would mean is a big deal. So in a sense maybe it's fair to make a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to a minor geography slip-up.

But I don't really think so. That's the same kind of logic that led the press to conclude it was okay to say Al Gore had lied and said he invented the internet even though he (a) never said that, and (b) what he did say was true. To the press, the important points were (a) the press didn't like Gore, and (b) Gore was a liar. Thus, any anecdote that could possibly be seized on to illustrate the point that Gore was a liar was seized on -- whether or not they were actually lies. It was BS then, and it's BS for it to happen to Huckabee. There's solid evidence out there that he's clueless on foreign policy, so point to the evidence.

After all, consider the opposite. There's also solid evidence that Rudy Giuliani is clueless about foreign policy. But there's no "Giuliani clueless about foreign policy" narrative. Instead, the narrative is about Giuliani's "strength" and "toughness." Similarly, John McCain's long years of interest in foreign affairs are taken as signs of depth and experience, even though what they amount to is long years spent advocating terrible ideas. But Giuliani and McCain haven't made any minor geography errors. Or if they have, they've been ignored. Or something. But on big-picture, real-world stuff that matters, they're all bad and the trivia is still just trivia.

Comments

Matt, why do you keep asking journalists to do actually inform their readers? Don't you know that serious journalists go about their serious business of worshipping power and elevating gossip to news are professionals? Unlike you pesky, radical bloggers who keep demanding "accountability" and for journalists to make a good faith effort to "inform" their public. geesh.

Posted by David | December 29, 2007 12:27 PM

"Or if they have, they've been ignored."

I think that's a key thing to realize. I used to think that Democrats and Liberals just needed to find people who wouldn't flub answers or make verbal gaffes. But the Gore "internet" story convinced me that it didn't matter. Further, every human being makes gaffes or verbal flubs - it's not important. So why should it be the focus of campaigns?

The truth is - it's NOT the focus of campaigns. The press ignores them often, or it doesn't, or it creates them. The press only uses them to push the common-wisdom narrative, because that's the way to get ahead and it's easy. Further, most of them are just not critical thinkers. They don't realize what they're doing - they just aren't smart in that way (whereas they often are clever or witty or good writers). Critical thinking is a different skill, and to be honest, it's discouraged in many professions and it's difficult to balance (we all have to take some things on faith - we can't be experts or analyze every statement we encounter in life). It's particularly discouraged in politics and political news - often a person who engages in critical thinking is criticized for just that reason.

Posted by MDtoMN | December 29, 2007 12:34 PM

Huckabee is smeared unfairly, and Huckabee would be a terrible president. These are not mutually contradictory.

That's exactly what's happening, because of Huckabee's peculiar position in the Republican party. He is hated by the ultra-wealthy elites who drive the party because they are unsure that they will be able to control his fiscal policy and maintain the dominance of their class to the level they expect. Even though Huckabee's domestic policy is uniformly terrible, he's being smeared unfairly for things like raising taxes to pay for state services that are not in themselves bad acts. Even though his immigration policy is either vacuous or awful, he's being smeared for taking a mildly compassionate position on the humanity of immigrants.

The media, which loves nothing more than wealth and power, are following the wealthy and powerful interests that constitute the Republican elite in smearing Mike Huckabee. That's wrong. The issue, though, is not that they should be lauding Huckabee, who's a crazy misogynist homophobe and a Muslim-hating reactionary. It's that they shouldn't be in thrall to the capitalist class.

The attacks on Mike "I would be a horrible president" Huckabee are a function of the dominance of the capitalist class over the media. So there's something to attack there.

Posted by DivGuy | December 29, 2007 12:37 PM

Gore made the press feel stupid. Thus, they had to destroy him. Bush made the press feel superior.

McCain / Huck. Watch for it.

Posted by Gore/Edwards 08 | December 29, 2007 12:39 PM

What Matt and commenters upthread (especially DivGuy) say!

Posted by Jeff S. | December 29, 2007 12:52 PM

DivGuy has it exactly right.
and it is amazing to watch the process play out, as the press does what it does with no apparent sense of irony.
whatever huckabee has said, it certainly is no dumber than the inane stuff bush spouted back in 2000 and it is certainly no dumber than what bush has said throughout his presidency.
yet, the press does not scrutinize the PRESIDENT'S words in the same way.
i had to keep from choking when i saw the cnn campaign correspondent, dana bash, i think is her name, talk about factchecking huckabee's claims about something.
this is the same reporter who would, verbatim, simply repeat whatever obvious lies the white house fed her, with no qualifications or caveats or skepticism and now she is going to have one of her gofers check on the accuracy of a candidate's statements!?
amazing.
the press plays its true role - as lapdog of the republicans - whenever crunch time comes.
democrats better be ready for the press to turn on any candidate they nominate, in the same way it is now going after huckabee.

Posted by frankie d | December 29, 2007 1:00 PM

DivGuy has it exactly right.
and it is amazing to watch the process play out, as the press does what it does with no apparent sense of irony.
whatever huckabee has said, it certainly is no dumber than the inane stuff bush spouted back in 2000 and it is certainly no dumber than what bush has said throughout his presidency.
yet, the press gave him a total pass as a candidate and still does not scrutinize his words even though he is the PRESIDENT.
i had to keep from choking when i saw the cnn campaign correspondent, dana bash, i think is her name, talk about factchecking huckabee's claims about something.
this is the same reporter who would, verbatim, simply repeat whatever obvious lies the white house fed her, with no qualifications or caveats or skepticism and now she is going to have one of her gofers check on the accuracy of a candidate's statements!?
amazing.
the press plays its true role - as lapdog of the republicans - whenever crunch time comes.
democrats better be ready for the press to turn on any candidate they nominate, in the same way it is now going after huckabee.

Posted by frankie d | December 29, 2007 1:06 PM

Didn't Al Gore say, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet"? That's not exactly a lie, but it sure it is a pompous, Senator-like way to take credit for something you deserve maybe .05% of the credit for.

Posted by too many steves | December 29, 2007 1:10 PM

Ignore what Huckabee said about where Pakistan is, focus on what he said about us being inundated with floods of Pakistani immigrants (see, he's tough on immigration after all! and on terrorism at the same time!).

I think we have a deal.

Posted by aleks | December 29, 2007 1:29 PM

DivGuy basically has it. I came here to post my phrasing of the non-mutual-exclusiveness as follows -- the question isn't whether the press overreacted. The press overreacts to things almost by definition. The question is whether the slip had meaning. Of course, the slip did have some meaning. Bill Clinton would not have been as likely to make that slip; neither would Al Gore have. They think about those countries all the time. Nobody's saying it consitutes, in itself, a reason to abandon a prior plan to vote for Huckabee. But it does have some small amount of meaning.

Posted by Martin | December 29, 2007 1:29 PM

too many steves is ignoring the "In the Senate" prefix to Gore's statement. Gore limited his role to his work in the Senate.

Any statement of accomplishment can be spun as "pompous". In fact, we've seen how any statement can be spun as anything you want. The secret is in the repetition.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | December 29, 2007 1:36 PM

What Harriet Myers was to the Supreme Court, Huckabee would be to the Presidency. The Dem's want nothing more than a Hillary/ Huckabee showdown because he'll be a cinch to beat. I say Iowan's need to open their eyes and see this buffoon for what he really is: a liberal against abortion!

Posted by Stephen | December 29, 2007 1:37 PM

MDtoMN has the press characterized just right. They know utterly nothing about Pakistan, so their "grading" Presidential candidates on their responses and coining winners and losers was hysterically funny.

Complete lack of critical thinking, shown in the Washington Post editorial on "The Pakistan Test".

One candidate, Democrat John Edwards, passed with flying colors.....Let's start with Mr. Edwards, who managed not only to get Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on the phone Thursday but also to deliver a strong message. The candidate said he had encouraged Mr. Musharraf "to continue on the path to democratization [and] to allow international investigators to come in and determine what happened, what the facts were." Those are words the Pakistani president needs to hear from as many Americans as possible.

If the journalist morons had just done a little thinking, they would have known that one of Slick Johnny's advisors had enough connections in the Clinton Administration days that he could get a call placed to Musharaff. Who then was treated to the exhortations of a one-term Senator with no foreign policy experience or present US policy power talking about the need for Pakistan to have foreigners from the FBI and MI-5 do the "investigation"...no doubt thinking Who the Fuck is on this phone??

It was a pure campaign stunt swallowed by the Post as a moment of great Edwards gravitas.

Hillary got high marks for having met Musharaff and Bhutto through her husband, and her "brilliance": "Ms. Clinton rightly cited "the failure of the Musharraf regime either to deal with terrorism or to build democracy," adding that "it's time that the United States sided with civil society in Pakistan."

Critical thinking would call Clintons remarks vacuous feel-good remarks of more democracy, less world hunger, more cute puppy dogs" variety.

Then Romney got bashed in the same editorial as "an anodyne response, avoiding serious comment" for saying he would push Pakistan to near the top of his plate and meet with the National Security Council, State Dept, and leaders of both parties in deciding how America should procede - but his own opinion right now is that Pakistan needs to continue to restore democracy, work cooperatively with the factions and parties, and collectively do more to fight Jihadism of the sort that is destabilizing countries including Pakistan and apparantly who killed Bhutto.

A pretty good response, not thin at all, IMO.

And they bashed the Huckster on his "sins" of not reading foreign news enough to "know" (as all reporters, photogenic teleprompter readers, and editorial writers assuredly did) - that Mushy ended martial law two weeks ago. Tying Pakistan to a Border threat after all the Christian immigrant love the Huckster of the past isn't finding much of lately.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 29, 2007 3:01 PM

There we have Chris "The-Racist" Fraud going on about garbage as usual.

I loved that name the minute I saw someone else use it for The Fraud. Huckabee is both ignorant and nuts, which is why he would be perfect for Chris.

Posted by Randall | December 29, 2007 3:40 PM

The primary candidates should play Jeopardy with questions about history and current events. That would get much higher rating than debates.

Posted by Steve Sailer | December 29, 2007 4:13 PM

It's also worth saying that although Huckabee doesn't seem to know many facts about the rest of the world, his instincts (be less arrogant, don't try to invade everywhere) seem better than everyone else's on the Republican side (even including Ron Paul). It's by no means clear to me that he's the worst candidate from a foreign policy standpoint and it's crazy that that's what he's getting bashed on... because "candidate X appears to disagree with base" is an easier story to write than "candidate X appears to be propounding objectively insane global strategy".

Posted by william | December 29, 2007 4:27 PM

On Friday, GOP Iowa frontrunner Mike Huckabee suggested Benazir Bhutto was killed because she posed a threat to the fundamentalist vision of the role of women. That vision, it turns out, is not far from his own.

For the details, see:
"Huckabee: Bhutto Did Not Graciously Submit to Woman's Role."

Posted by Angry | December 29, 2007 5:24 PM

It's also worth saying that although Huckabee doesn't seem to know many facts about the rest of the world, his instincts (be less arrogant, don't try to invade everywhere) seem better than everyone else's on the Republican side (even including Ron Paul).

While it's possible that his instincts might be better than the Giuliani/McCain side of the Republicans, the price of admittance into mainstream acceptance is going to be hiring a bunch of the crazy warmongers that are currently the "intellectual" leaders of the party. Rest assured that if he wins in Iowa he will be spouting the "On to Tehran!" line by NH.

Posted by Col Bat Guano | December 29, 2007 7:58 PM

It was a while back, but I seem to remember a presidential candidate in 2000 a lot like the huckster. This guy was a southern evangelical governor with a history of bipartisan cooperation, seemed like a nice sort of guy (you'd prefer to have a beer with him than the other guy), offered moderate policies, but didn't know much about the world outside of his home state. He didn't know all the names of all the capitals and all the leaders of every country, but we figured that it wasn't important and that he'd have people to figure those things out for him--not every president needs to be a foreign policy nerd. Well, we made our choice that year, and it all worked out all right, didn't it?

Posted by Ben | December 29, 2007 8:12 PM

"his instincts (be less arrogant, don't try to invade everywhere) seem better than everyone else's on the Republican side (even including Ron Paul)."

I'd like to see some evidence that his foreign policy would be more restrained than Ron Paul's.

I call bullshit on that one.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 29, 2007 9:42 PM

Meanwhile, Ford calls Clinton's remarks "puppy dog" while thinking this pablum is "not thin":

"he would push Pakistan to near the top of his plate and meet with the National Security Council, State Dept, and leaders of both parties in deciding how America should procede"

Right - like no other candidate would do that. (Well, I assume Bush would just call Cheney and ask what to do.)

Moron.

"but his own opinion right now is that Pakistan needs to continue to restore democracy, work cooperatively with the factions and parties, and collectively do more to fight Jihadism"

Right - like that's going to happen - not to mention being indistinguishable from the "and a pony" rhetoric of the rest of the candidates.

What Pakistan "needs to do" is irrelevant. Pakistan will continue doing what it has done for generations. What matters is what the US is going to do on its end to deal with what Pakistan does or does not do - or better yet, ignore what Pakistan does or does not do and decide what it will do in terms of its own actions and priorities.

And so far, not one single candidate has a clue about that.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 29, 2007 9:48 PM

I'd like to see some evidence that his foreign policy would be more restrained than Ron Paul's.

I suspect that Ron Paul's foreign policy would be sensible in its lack of use of military force, but that there'd be less interest in using American soft power constructively and the anti-UN and anti-internationalist rhetoric would be considerably crazier. Huckabee is the only Republican candidate who seems to be interested in positive, non-military engagement with the rest of the world.

Having said that, I have a lot of sympathy with Col Bat Guano's argument that craziness is the price of the nomination. Huckabee's rapid climbdown on the "arrogance" point was a clear example of this.

I also take Ben's point that Bush ended up being a very different type of foreign policy president than might have been expected. But 2000 wasn't a foreign policy election, and I think all the candidates have thought a bit more deeply about their positions this time round.

Posted by william | December 29, 2007 11:10 PM

I'm still upset that Romney paid no price for, in the early Republican debates, saying that things might have been different in Iraq if only Saddam Hussein had allowed the weapon inspectors in and they'd found nothing.

Posted by Rick Taylor | December 30, 2007 12:00 AM

"there'd be less interest in using American soft power constructively and the anti-UN and anti-internationalist rhetoric would be considerably crazier."

And just how would that get anybody killed? Or cost the US taxpayer a trillion dollars?

Has Huckabee promised a "grand bargain" with Iran? I don't think so.

A minute of Google gave me this quote from a Huckabee interview with Blitzer:

"Take for instance his recent interview with Wolf Blitzer on Late Edition this past Sunday where he fielded questions on Iran and Iraq. When Blitzer asked to describe his strategic approach toward preventing Iran from attaining nuclear weapons, Huckabee’s response was flip, ill-considered and uninformed.

Whatever it takes. We cannot allow Iran to have nuclear capacity. It’s as simple as that. We can’t allow it for a couple of reasons. One, they’ve already made clear their intentions to destroy Israel. (Secondly,) they have not shown a level of responsibility or restraint."

There's your next war right there, homes.

No way Ron Paul is going to attack Iran.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 30, 2007 2:11 AM

Yeah, it's a little silly to assume that the events in Pakistan comprise some sort of lens through which we can judge our candidates. It's an incredibly complex situation--over which we have minimal influence in any case--and I'd venture that most of the major players in Pakistan don't know what the hell to do about it either.

Posted by Matt | December 30, 2007 1:04 PM

Matt,

Great post, you've been reading your Daily Howler!!! Now, get on the horn with Drum and Marshall and get them on board too. We need a post like this every 2 or 3 days at a minimum.

By the way, there was nothing pompous about what Gore said. In much the same way that Truman created Interstate Highways, Gore created the Internet.

Al Gore and the Internet

By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the
Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the
Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among
people in government and the university community. But as the two people
who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the
Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a
Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to
our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of
time.

http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00311.html

Posted by Chuck | December 30, 2007 8:27 PM