Wow, an entire Associated Press story about how Huckabee may have made a fatal gaffe yesterday. The thing is, AP didn't quote outsiders saying this, they did their own election analysis, God bless them. They actually wrote a real news story, acted like real journalists, and analyzed the news rather than just regurgitating press releases in a never-ending contest of he-said-she-said. From AP:
Mike Huckabee may have finally gone too far.More after the jump...
After running an unconventional, surprisingly strong and sometimes strange race to the top tier of the Republican presidential campaign, the former Arkansas governor topped himself Monday with an eyebrow-raising campaign stunt.
He called a news conference to unveil a negative ad that he had just withdrawn from Iowa television stations because, he told a room full of journalists recording the ad, he had a sudden aversion to negative politics. Quite a convenient epiphany.
Funny that Huckabee decided at noon that that line was too negative, because he used it six hours earlier during a national TV interview.Huckabee has been embracing this fatal consistency for a while. While candidates like Romney simply disavow every past position that might harm their campaign, Huckabee embraces his prior inanities. AIDS may be caused by casual contact? Sure, Huckabee still believes it. It was right to feel sorry for a convicted rapist who then went on to sexually assault and murder two more women (after Huckabee helped free him)? Absolutely. And do we need to take America "back to Christ," screw the Jews, the Muslims, the Catholics and everyone else who isn't Southern Baptist? You betcha.
He used it on a Sunday news show, too.
And he didn't disavow the line Monday. "I said what I said. I spoke the truth," Huckabee said.
And Reuters is all over this too:
A staged event may have exposed presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee as a traditional politician rather than a self-described populist whose appeal has propelled him to the top of Iowa's polls....
A Baptist preacher, Huckabee told reporters he had changed his mind about the ad because he wanted to run a positive campaign. But critics said that by showing the ad to the media, he had nonetheless made sure his attacks on Romney would be seen and heard.
Analysts saw political calculation in the act. Some said the incident was only the latest of several gaffes that ultimately would burst Huckabee's surprise bubble at a critical moment in the lengthy presidential campaign.
"It looks slippery and starts to suggest he's not ready for prime time," Stephen Hess, an expert on presidential politics at the private Brookings Institution, told Reuters by telephone.
Hess said a political blooper right before the Iowa caucuses can make a difference "because so many make up their mind at the last minute."
