Huckabee to Drop Out
Filed under: 2008 elections, Mike Huckabee — marc moore on March 5, 2008 @ 3:12 am CET
Mike Huckabee’s spokesman has just told Fox News that he will be speaking within the hour and it is his intent to resign from the race for the Republican presidential nomination now that John McCain has all but won the nomination. More later.
Huckabee’s resignation speech:
"Ladies and gentlemen I called Senator McCain a few moments ago. It looks apparent tonight that he will in face achieved 1191 delegates to become the Republican nominee for the party.
I extended to him not only my congratulations but my commitment to him and to the party to do everything possible to unite our party but more importantly to unite our country so that we can be the best nation that we can be, not for ourselves but for the future generations to whom we owe everything, just as we owe previous generators for all that they have done for us.
Senator McCain ran an honorable campaign because he’s an honorable man. One of the things that I’m proudest of is that the 2 campaigns that have been run in the most civil manner are the two in the Republican party that have latest on their feet to the finals. And I’m grateful for the manner in which he has conducted his campaign and quite frankly with your great help I’m very proud of the way you have insisted that we conduct our campaign and it’s been one that we will always be able to say was done with honor.
It’s now important that we turn our attention not to what could have been or what we wanted to have been but what now must be and that is a united party, but a party indeed comes together on those principles that have brought many of us not just to this race but to politics in general."
…
"The apostle Paul wrote that I fought the good fight, I’ve finished the race, and I’ve kept the faith. I believe tonight that one of the things that we will be able to say is that not only have we fought the good fight and finished the race - we would have liked to have finished it first - but we stayed in it until the race was over.
But I think more importantly we’ve kept that faith and that for me has been the most important goal of all. I would rather lose an election than to lose the principles that got me into politics in the first place."
1 Jeff
March 5, 2008 @ 3:32 am CETLooks like we will all have to huddle behind the only real conservative left. Ron Paul!
2 marc moore
March 5, 2008 @ 3:44 am CETI expected Huckabee to do better in Texas tonight - 40%, at least.
Some of the gap, I think, is the media’s crowning of McCain - my own son didn’t know who McCain’s remaining opponent was - but it’s also obvious that the majority of Republicans prefer him. So be it.
3 Ted
March 5, 2008 @ 7:31 am CETI think McCain may pick him as his running mate, but I don’t think McCain has a chance really to win.
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4 Ted’s Soapbox 2.0 » Blog Archive » Huckabee says Huckabye
March 5, 2008 @ 7:58 am CET[…] “We kept the faith,” he told his end-of-the-road rally Tuesday after John McCain clinched the n…“I’d rather lose an election than lose the principles that got me into politics in the first place.” […]
5 b2obif
March 5, 2008 @ 2:08 pm CETnice
6 Thank Jebus
March 5, 2008 @ 2:41 pm CETadmin: if you can’t keep it G-rated, don’t comment
7 Jos76
March 5, 2008 @ 4:15 pm CETI’m shocked and disappointed that Huckabee would take money from struggling, hard-working Americans in order to fund his campaign. He said in his drop-out speech that it was…"the sacrifices of a truck driver in Michigan, of a housewife who sold her wedding ring on eBay and gave the contribution to the campaign, a janitor in Alabama who has a wife in a wheelchair who gave $20, not out of his abundance, but out of his poverty, so that our campaign could stay on the track." In a bad economy, why would someone running for President take their money to fund a campaign that was clearly going to be fruitless? What would become of the economy if selfish Huckabee were President?
Jos76
http://www.jos76.wordpress.com
8 Bob
March 5, 2008 @ 4:51 pm CETIt might not be fruitless if he is named VP. You have to look at the bigger picture.
9 Sue
March 5, 2008 @ 5:39 pm CETMc Cain/Huckabee FTW!! : )
10 carl
March 5, 2008 @ 6:30 pm CETif huckame was a real christian he would have dropped out earlier and spent those last millions from his campaign on something christian, poor people, or free clinics…..but its no about that is it?…its about keeping what mine, mine all mine!
11 Jason
March 5, 2008 @ 6:34 pm CETI used to stick up for fundamentalist Christians a lot because I think they get bashed unfairly by the far left.
But the net effect of Huckabee’s campaign, with its willful inclusion of religious prejudice and its openness about claiming divine mandate for both personal and partisan aggrandizement, has been to seriously undermine my personal sympathy for the so-called religious right. Alas, much of what the far left said about the so-called “religious right” wanting to amend the Constitution and impose other tests (e.g. “no Mormons need apply”) to impose a fundamentalist vision of religious purity turned out to be true, at least as far as the Huckabee campaign was concerned.
By giving loud voice to some of the most intolerant aspects of his movement and by sticking with it far longer than was reasonable, Mike Huckabee has done more to alienate potential allies than he could possibly know. His enthusiastic embrace of anti-Mormon bigotry was the beginning of a 21st century version of Pat Robertson’s 1991 campaign. Hopefully, Huckabee’s smiling-face-shiv-in-the-back campaign will fade into oblivion.
If McCain is foolish enough to put him on the ticket, I don’t see how I could ever vote for it. Such a move might solidify McCain’s status among a segment of religious conservatives, but it would alienate one of Republicans’ most loyal constituencies (Mormons) and seriously undermine McCain’s natural base of support among moderates.
12 Bob
March 5, 2008 @ 9:55 pm CETI get sick of the blanket statement that people voted against Romney because he was Mormon. While there are some that did, there are much more that didn’t buy his "conversion" and felt he was just another flip-flopper from Mass.
And the religious right has been saying for years they want to amend the constitution. How did Huckabee change that? To them it’ s no different than wanting to change laws to end slavery or people who wanted prohibition. To them the reasons are grounded from faith. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have any other legitimate reasons for wanting the laws changed.
The far left doesn’t get that and probably never will. To them it’s keep your faith quiet and some even farther want it completely out of society to the point of forced atheism. I grew up more with that thought process than fundies. So while I do think fundies go to far, I at least sympathize.
13 redfish
March 5, 2008 @ 10:37 pm CETAnd lets just be clear, the whole basis for the idea that Huckabee was ‘enthusiastically embracing’ anti-Mormon bigotry is a stupid question he asked after reporters were trying to bait all of the Republican candidates into saying something about Mormonism. It was not a "slick political move" on his part at all.
I mean you can believe whatever you want to about it, but there’s a lot of BS floating around this election cycle about all the candidates. McCain is not a liberal, Huckabee is not a bigot, Obama did reject Farrakhan, Clinton did not call Obama a ‘fairy tale’
I mean grow up.
14 Jason
March 5, 2008 @ 10:49 pm CETYou are all assuming that Huckabee’s entire association with anti-Mormons was that one question. In reality, his association with anti-Mormon bigotry goes MUCH further back to a speech he delivered to an anti-Mormon group in SLC well over a decade ago and includes a much more willful and consistent acceptance of anti-Mormon support than just one question to a reporter. And while Huckabee claims to have apologized privately to Romney, his campaign made ZERO effort to publicly retract or disavow the many anti-Mormon slurs that were spewing from both the campaign staff themselves as well as many Huckabee supporters. Many of those who demanded that Obama disavow Farrakhan’s statements (which he did) and who demanded Ron Paul fully and credibly account for his past and present associations with racists (which he did not) seem to magically adopt a much more lenient standard about anti-Mormon statements from Huckabee supporters.
There is no question in my mind that the question to the reporter was intentional and planned. Huckabee was trying to position himself as the "Christian" (stated specifically many times in campaign literature contrasting him to Romney) alternative to the (presumably) "non-Christian" Romney. I’ve spent almost 20 years studying anti-Mormon literature. I don’t believe for a second that all the EXACT SAME coded references about “magic underwear”, “Jesus and Satan are brothers” and other standard anti-Mormon memes just happened to crop up from the Huckabee campaign and supporters nor do I believe that people who were clearly well-educated about every detail of their primary political rival just happened to be honestly unaware of longstanding slurs about his religion and just happened to trip over them unintentionally.
Yes, Huckabee as well as many of his supporters were and are religious bigots, in my opinion. Unlike you, redfish, I will not make personal attacks on those who disagree with me on this point. But I stand behind my charge because the alternative explanations for their anti-Mormon behaviors are implausible.
15 redfish
March 5, 2008 @ 11:12 pm CETJason,
Many of his supporters were religious bigots, as it turns out. There are many evangelicals who buy into anti-Mormon propaganda. (Other evangelicals supported Romney) But if Huckabee planned it, it was the stupidest political move he could have made, nothing slick and devious like people portray it—I mean it would have hurt him in NH—and by all appearances he couldn’t have planned it, because he refused and refused to raise anything about Mormons during that interview but he reporter kept on encouraging it.
My belief about what happened, is that Huckabee growing up among anti-Mormonism, has heard that said about Mormons, which is why he knew the question, and he only asked, when (if you read about the interview) the reporter claimed to be an expert on Mormonism and invited a question about it. Prior to that, he refused to make a comment on Mormonism. That is to me the only plausible explanation of what happened.
If there were questions around an anti-Mormon convention he attended, thats what should have been brought up, not his discussion with the reporter. From the very few things I’ve heard about that, Huckabee didn’t say anything anti-Mormon in that speech either.
Furthermore, Huckabee not only has resisted saying anything about Mormons, but he’s even praised atheists who "stand on their principles"
When I said grow up, I was more broadly talking about all the political nonsense in total that is happening about this cycle, I didn’t mean it as a personal comment, so i hope no hard feelings are involved.
Personally I think people should resist making conclusions about candidates based