Mike Huckabee says presidential run won’t be affected by others’ decisions

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who once said he’d consider backing off a 2016 presidential run if his friend Jeb Bush was in the race, said Sunday that he won’t bow out for the former Florida governor or anybody else.

“I like Jeb. We’re good friends. He’ll be a very formidable candidate. But if I run for president … it’s not going to be because someone else did or did not,” Mr. Huckabee said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“It’s going to be because I think that the country needs some common-sense leadership that bring us back to fiscal sanity, where we quit spending money we don’t have and stop borrowing money we can never afford to pay back,” he said.

Mr. Huckabee ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and effectively finished second to nominee John McCain, winning the Iowa caucus and a half-dozen Republican primaries across the South.

He said that this spring he expects to make a “declaration” about his intentions for the presidential race.

Earlier this month, he quit his political talk show “Huckabee” on the Fox News Channel to explore another presidential run. He’s in a crowded field of potential GOP contenders, including Mr. Bush and 2012 Republican standard bearer Mitt Romney.

Mr. Huckabee pushed back against Republicans who have discouraged Mr. Romney from making another run for the White House, saying his loss to Mr. Obama last time demonstrated his inability to connect with voters.

“It’s wide open. Anybody could be a contender,” said Mr. Huckabee. “One of the things about politics, when you’re actually there you realize that you are on a high wire and there is no net under you. On any given day your campaign can implode for something that happens inadvertently or intentionally.”

He continued: “So you never say that someone is not a contender, that they can’t make it. I hear that all the time about a lot of different people. Nobody knows. Voters will make that decision and that’s the way it ought to be.”