Video: Huckabee on AIDS, Mormonism, and immigration

posted at 1:47 pm on December 9, 2007 by Allahpundit
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A full plate this morning — so full, in fact, that Wallace didn’t even get to ask about Wayne Dumond, which was probably slated to be the lead topic when the interview was scheduled. First up are Huck’s old comments about AIDS, duly spun here with nonsense about how he supposedly wasn’t calling for a quarantine in 1992 even though he specifically complained about this being the first time where “the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population” and said “we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague.” Then he references the Bergalis case from 1991; see my last update to yesterday’s post for why that’s disingenuous. It was an outlier and known to be so at the time.

His answer on immigration contemplates what kind of admission policy we’ll have if we ever do get the border under control. Tancredo wants a “time out” on all legal immigration, a position most of the other candidates don’t support. Huck wants a wide gate with much shorter waiting times but he doesn’t say how wide the gate should be or how often it should be open. (The rest of the field hasn’t said, either.) Presumably it would be keyed to America’s labor demands; does Huck agree? And how does that weigh vis-a-vis the demand among people waiting to get in and “feed their families”? I ask only because he’s made clear that his soul, not economic policy, guides him on this subject.

Finally, his answer on Mormonism is solid although it came in the context of a question about Krauthammer’s op-ed, the whole point of which was that of course Huck isn’t going to bait Mitt on religion explicitly. You don’t need to say “Mormons are suspicious” to attract Christian voters suspicious of Mormonism. You just need to remind them that they have a non-suspicious option in the field’s resident “Christian leader” and let them put two and two together. Be careful, though, about assuming that Huck’s support is coming entirely from the religious: It’s true he’s doing well in states known for having strong religious contingents but get a load of this. The guy is for real, however much “glib naivete” may infuse his policy proposals.

I leave you with this, from the LA Times’s report on the Dumond case. The left wants to believe Huck went to bat for Dumond because one of his victims was related to Bill Clinton. The truth seems to be something different:

[Pastor Jay] Cole, meanwhile, was working to help DuMond. Cole said he talked to “probably a hundred people” about his hope of winning DuMond’s release, turning foremost to the evangelical community. He said many evangelicals were encouraged that DuMond had claimed a religious conversion, and that many joined Cole in writing to Huckabee about DuMond’s situation.

The clincher, he said, was their belief that DuMond had been “saved.”

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