Happy Huckabee Gets Mad
David Freedlander
Gone is the sunny, compassionate candidate of 2008. In the run-up to 2016, the former Arkansas governor is downright angry. Hes learned his lesson from his last campaign, ex-aides say.
In 2007, Mike Huckabee stood impassively on a Republican presidential debate stage while Mitt Romney tried to embarrass him. A program that Huckabee had instituted in Arkansas gave undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children the right to in-state tuition at Arkansass public universities.
Huckabee sounded, Romney said, like a Massachusetts liberal. Are we going to give taxpayer-funded benefits to kids that are here illegally and put them ahead of kids that are here legally? he asked.
Huckabee explained that the kids who benefitted were brought to the U.S. as children, that they had spent all their young lives in Arkansass public schools, and that, in many cases, they had excelled. He alluded to his own storygoing to work at 14 as a local radio host, working his way through Ouachita Baptist University in two and half years.
Let me finish, Mitt, he said when the former Massachusetts governor tried to interject. In all due respect, we are a better country than to punish children for what their parents did. Were a better country than that.
It was one of the more remarkable moments of the 2008 campaign. Here was a presidential contender not pandering to an anti-immigrant crowd but shaming his party and, for that matter, his nationto be better. Rare is the candidate who cuts against the grain of party orthodoxy; rarer still is one who uses the campaign to educate and persuade the public.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/06/happy-huckabee-gets-mad.html