Opinion: Mike Huckabee’s inner thoughts, pre-race
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The country will again see the increasingly familiar face of former Arkansas governor and former nobody Mike Huckabee on the Sunday morning talk shows today. He’s hot because he won the Republican Iowa caucus last week. He’ll be in another debate, the last before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, later today on Fox News. And he and the four other invited GOP candidates -- Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson -- will, of course, discuss a variety of issues with Chris Wallace. (Fox decided to exclude Reps. Ron Paul of Texas, who beat Giuliani in Iowa and leads Thompson in New Hampshire polls, and Duncan Hunter of Alpine.)
But The Times’ Joe Mathews recently came across an interesting and revealing passage in one of Huckabee’s books, ‘Character Makes a Difference,’ published last June before anyone took seriously the latest improbable presidential run by an Arkansas governor from the town of Hope. Here it is:
‘I hear one comment a lot these days: ‘Now that you’ve been governor, I guess you want to be the next guy from Arkansas to go to the White House.’ If I really wanted to move up to the next level, I’d have plenty of company. There are 135 people in the Arkansas state legislature who think they could be governor. There are probably 50 governors who think they could be president; there are 100 senators and 435 members of the House who think the same things. Wherever you are, there’s a temptation to want to jump to the next level. I have come to realize that my next position might be at quite a different level. It may be running a soup kitchen somewhere. I’d rather be doing something I know I’m supposed to do than something everybody tells me is right. If you’re the governor of a state, there aren’t many jobs you can take in that state that people will think are more important. The great, liberating comfort for me and other believers is that God, not man, is in control, and He knows what is best for me. I am not to be so ambitious that I start thinking I know better than God what’s best for me. That’s not to say ambition is bad; everybody should have some ambition and strive to do his best. But I could run a marina and tackle shop at Lake Greeson near Murfreesboro and be quite content.’
Not the usual writing fare of careful candidates-to-be. Food for thought. Thanks for that, Joe.
--Andrew Malcolm