Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was on The Situation Room last night and made what I thought were some wise comments on Iraq.
“I don’t want us to end up having to do over what we didn’t do right, and that’s why we have got to stay until the job is done,” he said. “General Petraeus was given until September. It is incredibly, to me, inappropriate for to us be talking about withdrawing before he’s even had a chance to put the surge into place.”
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson also was on, and he made a sorry case for immediate withdrawal.
“Every month that goes by is over 100 of Americans soldiers die; 25,000 are wounded,” Richardson said. “This is not working. This surge is not working. You can see it every day with violence increasing, but also instability in the region.”
Casualties are not proof positive that a military strategy is not working. By that logic, we lost Iwo Jima. Huckabee’s response was excellent.
“If we pull out prematurely, the one thing we won’t have is stability. And I think that’s why many of us believe that, as painful as it is to stay, it’s more painful to disappear, lose any chance of stability.”
Hat tip: Hotline On Call.
That’s sort of what U.S. House Majority Leader James Clyburn acknowledged Monday in an interview with The Washington Post. He said that if Gen. David Petraeus’ September report was largely positive, it would “be a real big problem” for the Democrats and that his party “by and large would be wise to wait on the report” before making further recommendations about Iraq.
That’s more or less what Huckabee and most Republicans are saying.
If Huckabee can get to New Hampshire more often, Republicans here will find that he is more eloquent on and prepared to discuss foreign policy than they might suppose, his having been a governor, not a federal office holder.
A few weeks ago I offered as a trivia prize a jumbo-sized Optimus Prime action figure. The prize winner went on vacation shortly after winning, and when she got back she chose her prize. It wasn’t Mr. Prime. He’s not happy about that.
The winner was none other than former state Democratic Party Chairman Kathy Sullivan, who knew that the New Hampshire landmark mentioned in a recent American Express ad was Lake Winnipesaukee.
Instead of opting for Optimus, she took home The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism, by Ross King. If she gets vaporized in the next few days, don’t be surprised. I know, Optimus Prime is supposed to protect all humans, but if someone told him Sullivan was head of the state Democrats, it’s possible he misheard and thinks she was head of the state Decepticons.
With the last trivia prize gone, here’s the next question:
Which presidential candidate was born in the Panama Canal Zone?
Oh, and Optimus Prime is still available as a prize.
I’m at the Rudy Giuliani town hall meeting in Nashua. Will be live blogging it:
Giuliani started with a Red Sox joke. He said he’d end early tonight so everyone could get home and watch the Major League All-Star Game, which, by the way, is the only time he can pull for “a Red Sock” because he’s an American League fan.
“I think there are two big things that this next election,” he said to start. “One of them is the terrorists’ war on us.”
“America has to have a policy, it has to have an approach, it has to have a way to deal with it in the long term.”
The way to do it is to be on offense, he said. “We put ourselves in grave jeopardy if we go back on defense.” We need to make sure “this country does not show weakness to Islamic terrorists.”
Next he said he’d keep government small so the economy could thrive. He used health care as an example, criticizing Democratic candidates — Obama, Clinton, and Edwards by name — for seeking universal health care.
“Have you ever had anybody ask you to help them get you into a French, German, or Canadian hospital for a heart transplant?” he asked.
“The greatness of America comes not from a large, imposing government… but from its people.”
First questioner asked what he thought of AmeriCorps and national service. Giuliani said he supports AmeriCorps and would encourage more Americans to do volunteer service.
The second question was from a native New Yorker who asked what Giuliani would do about illegal immigration.
“I’m going to do everything I can to end illegal immigration.”
There is nothing to be gained in this country by illegal immigration, he said.
He would do that by hiring more border patrol agents and increasing border security. We should know the identities of everyone who crosses the border, he said.
“If we can secure our borders, we can then make a more rational choice about what to do with the people here.” If we don’t secure our borders we can’t make rational choices “because anything we do will encourage more people” to come here.
“Everybody who comes in this country should have a tamper-proof ID card.”
Third question: How will he make sure members of the government are held responsible for their actions.
“The best way for a President to assure accountability is … you have to set goals for every one of your agencies.”
You have to figure out what they should be accomplishing, hold them to it, and publish the findings on the Internet, he said.
Fourth question, does Rudy have a plan for the cost of higher ed.
“I think the cost of higher education is something we have to help people with more.”
He would do that by helping students find access to more money. How this is a conservative position, I have no idea. He also wants to “increase the growth of the American economy.”
“One of the ways I could help you take care of your college loan, believe it or not, is to lower taxes.”
Now that’s a conservative position.
Fifth question: What did he think of the 9/11 Commission saying the attacks were partly America’s fault. Rudy, of course, disagreed, as he’s made a point of doing before. He mentioned returning the $10 million check from the Saudi prince.
“They want to kill us and attack us for their reasons, not ours.”
“It is an extremely distorted version of their religion, which they’ve turned into an ideology.”
“The reason they’ve attacked us is we represent freedom, we represent democracy, we represent capitalism, we represent freedom for women.”
“The reality is, they despise us, they hate us, and they want to destroy us… We could change our foreign policy 100 different ways, and they’d still hate us.”
The September 11 attacks have nothing to do with American foreign policy. . . Before September 11 radical Islamists killed 500 Americans.”
Sixth question, from “an educator,” who asked how he would help educate girls in other countries.
“If we could find out how to help empower women more in these societies, I think it would make a big difference.”
Women should have the same educational opportunities as men, and the way to do that is to treat everyone the same, he said.
He then said that American higher education is the best in the world, while k-12 is where we are struggling.
Why? The reason is that they have “two different models.” Higher education is “consumer driven.” Nobody makes you go to a college or community college you don’t want to go to. K-12 “is not an American model.” The government compels you to go to a particular school.
“If we could make the basic model of American public education like American higher education, we could quickly reform American public education, it would be the best in the world.”
“We could do that not by spending any more money, but by spending less money.”
We could do it by handing every parent a voucher, he said.
One of the ways to defeat Islamic terrorism is “by empowering women.”
And that was it. Short event, but Rudy handled the crowd very well. He was charming and light-hearted. He has an ability to present his ideas as simply common sense, and that seems to go over well, at least with a friendly crowd.
Unfortunately, no horrifically stupid questions. I was really hoping for someone to ask something so ridiculous that Rudy would mock him mercilessly from the stage. Sigh. Maybe next time.
Former Gov. John H. Sununu popped up in the L.A. Times story about Fred Thompson’s possible role lobbying for an abortion rights group in 1991.
The group, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, says it hired Thompson in 1991 to lobby the White house to drop its rule forbidding abortion counseling at clinics that received federal money. Board meeting minutes record members discussing Thompson’s work. But Thompson’s campaign denies he ever worked for the group.
Sununu said he had no recollection of being lobbied by Thompson on that issue.
“I don’t recall him ever lobbying me on that at all. I don’t think that ever happened. In fact, I know that never happened,” he said.
What a juicy story. Documents from a pro-abortion group suggest that he Great Conservative Hope (GCH) took money to promote a pro-abortion cause, but the person he supposedly lobbied says the act never took place, and so far no billing or other records have surfaced to prove what the board minutes seem to show.
To be sure ,this story hasn’t seen its last days. If Thompson did the lobbying, his credibility on abortion is shot. Or at least it’s knocked down to the same level as Giuliani and Romney, which is to say that pro-lifers won’t trust him much if any more than they do those two. That could end Thompson’s campaign because Thompson’s status as the GCH rests on his perceived consistency on core conservative values when contrasted with the records of Romney, Giuliani and McCain. If he proves as inconsistent as the others, or as suspect as them, pro-lifers and other movement conservatives are back to square one in their search for the next Ronald Reagan.
