Ed Morrissey had an exclusive interview with Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee who insists pulling the ads was a genuine decision on his part because he felt they were wrong — and that in retrospect perhaps they should not have played them for the press.
Key quotes:
Regarding ads opposing Huckabee: (24:28) “The ads were dishonest …. misrepresentations and outright fabrications of my record.”
–A pattern: (24:36) “The same kind of ads were going against John McCain in New Hampshire. … not an accident or an isolated incident.”
–Why he pulled the ads: (25:25) “The television set (in Iowa) become virtually a cesspool … People keep saying that they want a positive campaign, and let’s give them an opportunity to prove that that’s exactly what they want.”
–On showing the ad to the press: (26:57) “Maybe in hindsight we’d have done it differently, but if we had said that we had an ad that we were going to run but now we’re not going to run it, the press would have said, ‘Oh yeah, right — where is the ad? You don’t have one.'”
Listen to it HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.