Friendly advice to Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee: The proper place for your foot is either on the ground or a few inches above it as you walk, not in your mouth. You don’t want to see a story a day about you making some silly gaffe or statement your opponents can use against you. Something like this:
Mike Huckabee used the volatile situation in Pakistan Friday to make an argument for building a fence on the American border with Mexico and found himself trying to explain a series of remarks about Pakistanis and their nation.
On Thursday night he told reporters in Orlando, Fla.: “We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country.”
So now there is a NEW THREAT: Pakistanis secretly streaming across American borders.
You can tell when a campaign assertion goes over like a lead balloon and the candidate and staff scramble to do damage control. You see something like this:
On Friday, in Pella, Iowa, he expanded on those remarks.
“When I say single them out I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he told reporters in Pella. “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.”
Well, then, THAT explains it. Right?
Wellllllllllllll:
In fact, far more illegal immigrants come from the Philippines, Korea, China and Vietnam, according to recent estimates from the Department of Homeland Security.
Asked how a border fence would help keep out Pakistani immigrants, Mr. Huckabee argued that airplane security was already strong, but that security at the southern United States border was dangerously weak.
“The fact is that the immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds, it’s about someone coming with a shoulder-fired missile,” he said.
Huckabee should know better. He and several other candidates came across as looking inept, unthoughtful or cravenly political yesterday upon hearing about the turmoil in Pakistan. See our post HERE.
TWO STORIES in two days that contained comments a candidate needed to clarify should be red flag to GOPers for several reasons:
(1) if Huckabee is making gaffes like this at the rate of one a day it shows he has a tin ear to how the media operates or how important words are in a campaign, (2) his inaccuracy about Pakistani immigrants will be the beginning of a credibility problem if he makes more inaccurate assertions, (3) David Letterman has settled with his writers so candidates who have been spared the poll-influencing, conventional-wisdom setting influence of topical TV comedians will find very soon that their respite has come to an end (other TV comedians are expected to settle with their writers).
If yours truly was uncharitable, we would run this “switched” joke that we just revamped for Huckabee on TMV. But we would never run this:
Reporter: Governor Huckabee, what is your position on the Mexican border?
Huckabee: Is he paying his rent?
But we won’t do that..
In pure political terms, Huckabee’s comments suggest someone who is Not Ready For Primetime as a national candidate. Or someone who needs better “handlers.”
On the other hand, the guy does have a high caliber sense of humor…
SOME VIEWS FROM OTHER WEBLOGS:
—Stop The ACLU:
I think it is simple. Huckabee jumps the gun on a current issue in order to patch up his weak positions on the border and immigration. He gets too eager and doesn’t make sure of the facts. Presidential material? I don’t think so.
Yeah, all those people crawling across the Sonoran desert in the 120-degree heat are really Pakistani terrorists armed with shoulder-launched RPGs and anti-aircraft missiles. Be sure to check the maid for plastique, and make sure the gardener isn’t putting in land mines.
Some political xenophobia is wielded with cold, calculated opportunism. Huckabee prefers a more hot-blooded mondo whacko kind of flavor. On reading the article…. I at first felt a very selfish, materialistic sense of excitement to imagine that we might share a Southern border with Pakistan. The shopping opportunities… the rugs… tandoori… ah, it’s not to be.
There seems to be no end to the negative stories coming out about former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee today…..I guess the blush is off the rose as far as the media and Huckabee are concerned. Romney’s ground game in Iowa should either give him a win, or a closer second than what some may be thinking. By Super Tuesday, I imagine Huckabee will be done. But it remains unclear how the rest of the race will play out.
Incidentally, not that I’m particularly worried about Pakistanis, some of whom are in fact my neighbors, but since Huckabee raised the issue, we should note there are an estimated 100,000 Pakistanis in Canada. The number in Mexico? 250
— My DD:
Wow. Not only did Huckabee in one fell swoop eclipse Tom Tancredo in the immigrant fear mongering department but he also showed his continued ignorance…How could Huckabee make such a mistake? FoxNews reported that Huckabee cited the CIA as a source but later clarified that it was in fact a Denver Post article. So not ready for prime time.
Can we stop pretending that this guy has a shot at the nomination, please and focus on the ones most likely to win this thing, Huckabee’s current lead in Iowa notwithstanding: Romney and McCain? As I see it, we should all be doing what we can to ensure it’s the former.
This goes beyond mere cluelessness to outright stupidity. I would think that the millions of Mexican illegals who flow across our border every year would be enough to warrant a border fence without resorting to rather bizarre concerns over illegals coming from a nation on the other side of the globe. But Huckabee’s concerns about Pakistani illegals are even more bizarre when you factor in his support for entitlements for illegal immigrants already in this country.
I know the “intelligent design” crowd are a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to stuff like evolution, but consensus reality really does hold that China does not share a border with the US…Huckabee, ever on the cutting edge of the immigration forefront (well, at least since he decided there was one) alerts us to a heretofore unheralded problem at the border…
The media’s covering this with surprising attentiveness, doubtless not so much because of Huck’s shakiness on the facts than his audacious suggestion that people hailing from the nation where the “real terrorists” are and behaving unusually might warrant a bit of extra scrutiny. Oh well. If that’s what it takes to get them off the Huck bandwagon, so be it. Attack, media! Attack like the wind!
Your quote of the day, from CNN’s senior political analyst no less, dismissing the suggestion that Huck’s string of Pakistan gaffes might hurt him: “Mike Huckabee is a populist. His comments on Pakistan reflect a populist understanding of the crisis, which, is to say, not much.” Viva populism!
The fact that the Huckster thinks Afghanistan is east of Pakistan and confuses migrant fruit pickers with Islamic extremists from Waziristan, is only a small part of the evidence that the man has no idea what he is talking about but has a strong feeling that vague mumblings in an ominous tone will allow him to latch on to the Xenophobic and Nativist gravy train. That’s just what we need to represent the United States’ interests in the world; a dishonest idiot who thinks Jesus wants him in power and will do the thinking for him. Come to think of it, that’s what we have been saddled with for these last seven years of bad luck, and that’s what we customarily vote for.
Three gaffes in less than 24 hours has got to b unsettling even to ardent Mike lovers. You just can’t make stuff up in the new media environment.
That Huckabee pivoted from Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s death to U.S. immigration says to me that with Huckabee presidency, we’d get someone who doesn’t really think in terms of foreign policy when international events occur (he doesn’t know the geography; he doesn’t have the facts straight), but pretty much only in terms of how international events impact domestic issues. And, Huckabee’s tack on Bhutto’s assassination tell me a Huckabee presidency would be one of four more years of the national politics of fear. We do not need four more years of simple-minded foreign policies and four more years of fear-mongering.
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.