Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee takes aim at Bill and Hillary Clinton as part of a new video that will introduce him at his “official announcement” on Tuesday in Arkansas.
Mr. Huckabee, who won the 2008 Iowa caucuses, is expected to become the fourth Republican to enter the race during an event in Hope. He would be following in the footsteps of freshman Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida.
The “Nailed Shut” video casts Mr. Huckabee as a fighter who pushed back against the Clintons and the Democratic establishment during his rise to become governor of Arkansas in the 1990s.
“On his first day in office, Gov. Huckabee’s door was nailed shut. It was in Bill Clinton’s Arkansas,” says Rex Nelson, a former campaign manager and reporter for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “You had all the apparatus of the Democratic party aligned against Mike Huckabee, and all of a sudden this Republican comes out of nowhere and wins.”
The anti-Clinton message underscores the general consensus that Mrs. Clinton, who announced her candidacy last month, is the clear favorite to win the Democratic nomination. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is also running.
In the video, Mr. Huckabee vows to protect Social Security and Medicare, to lead with “moral clarity” and to keep “all the options on the table” in the fight to defeat radical Islam.
“Every day of my life in politics was a fight, and sometimes it was an intense one,” Mr. Huckabee says in the spot. “But any drunken redneck can walk into a bar and start a fight. A leader only starts a fight that he’s prepared to finish.”
Mr. Huckabee says he cut taxes and reduced the state’s welfare rolls. He says he balanced the state budget and increased family income by 50 percent.
“One thing that has to happen in America is moving the power away from Washington, where people are so disconnected from the way that so many ordinary Americans live,” he says. “It’s a disaster. Power needs to be local and limited, because the closer government is to the people, the more accountable it is to the people who are being governed.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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