Ed Rollins - Huckabee's UnChristian Campaign Chairman

Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images. Huckabee Campaign Manager Ed Rollins





No surprise that Dobbs is friendly with the Huckabee campaign... but Huck's campaign manager's language doesn't sound like he represents the very Christian base that is supporting his boss.

Maybe this is normal campaign type of language-- coming from Huckabee's campaign chairman - could this be a sample of what is in the future?

-Rollins made a phone call to Lou Dobbs and said he would ready to have drinks with him after Iowa to talk about Hillary. There also was a reference to Rollins’ recent comments about wanting to knock Romney’s teeth out, as Rollins told Dobbs “they are all porcelain.”

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from the Huffington Post:

Thursday, January 03, 2008
Huckabee Chairman Ed Rollins Trashes Romney
Posted by: Jonathan Garthwaite at 4:52 PM
Amanda Carpenter files this report from the ground in Iowa:


At a hole-in-the wall Des Moines eatery, Mike Huckabee’s campaign chairman loudly bashed their top rival presidential candidate Mitt Romney and made several predictions to two national television reporters.

I overheard Rollins’ conversation while dining in a restaurant called Winston’s located close to Huckabee’s Iowa headquarters and took notes on my computer. Below is a compilation of what I heard:

-He distinctly talked about going negative in South Carolina and told someone on the phone to “put some good in there if you have to, with the bad. Do what you gotta do.”

-Rollins let the f-bomb fly twice and told his blonde female dining companion a joke about flying the Confederate flag in the South Carolina state capitol.

-Rollins indicated several times their campaign was the victim of “dirty tricks” and that they were being unfairly outspent.

-Rollins also criticized another candidate as believing the Presidency was “their birthright.”

-Rollins made a phone call to Lou Dobbs and said he would ready to have drinks with him after Iowa to talk about Hillary. There also was a reference to Rollins’ recent comments about wanting to knock Romney’s teeth out, as Rollins told Dobbs “they are all porcelain.”

-Rollins also called Andrea Mitchell and predicted Obama would take Iowa tonight. He called Mitchell “sweetie” several times.

-Rollins believes Rudy Giuliani is “done,” “has no money,” and was “hurt terribly by those police cruises with his girlfriends.”

-Rollins called said Fred Thompson was “as disgrace as a candidate. Fred has been a friend a long time, but has never converted a single vote. No one is taking him seriously.”

-Rollins indicated he feels good about Iowa and that “all the sales are made, the customers just have to show up.”

-Rollins ate a tuna melt and carrot cake. His female companion picked “marbled rye” bread.
Rollins obviously didn't appreciate the report.

http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/13a3122e-dfd6-4d8a-81a3-bc8c6e11f550

Huckabee's Dream of a Brutal America

Mike Huckabee running undocumented immigrants out of town



Reading the following information left me in shock. Huckabee's trajectory now sounds like that of a dictator - he moves from endorsing DREAMERS to ejecting them (and their families) from the country. If the GOP nominates this man, it shows American voters that the party has truly lost touch with reality.


Huckabee's "Secure America" plan twins a similar crackdown with a proposal to give all illegal immigrants 120 days to register with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and to leave the country.


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For Republicans, Contest's Hallmark Is Immigration
By Jonathan Weisman
Wednesday, January 2, 2008; A01
Washington Post


The imagery of the mailings is designed to pack a wallop: a Mexican flag fluttering above the Stars and Stripes, the Statue of Liberty presiding over a "Welcome Illegal Aliens" doormat, a Social Security card emblazoned with the name "Juan Doe," a U.S. passport proclaiming, "Only one candidate has a plan to STAMP out illegal immigration."

As Republican presidential candidates troll for votes, they have flooded mailboxes in Iowa and New Hampshire with such loaded images. Their campaigns have filled the airwaves, packed their Web sites and taunted their adversaries, proclaiming their concern over porous borders and accusing opponents of insufficient vigilance.

No issue has dominated the Republican presidential nomination fight the way illegal immigration has. Under consistent attack for inconsistent conservatism, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has turned to the issue again and again to shore up his conservative credentials. Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, running as the law-and-order candidate, has been forced onto the defensive by immigration policies in his city.

And just days after he delivered a passionate defense of the humanity of undocumented children in a Republican debate, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee presented one of the most punitive immigration platforms seen in this campaign season, rejecting legislation to provide the children of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship if they finish high school, attend two years of college or join the military.

Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney have all used illegal immigration to try to prove to voters that they are the toughest and most conservative candidates in the field. And they have used it with brutal consistency in an attempt to marginalize Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), whose vocal support for legislation to clamp down on border security while offering illegal immigrants a path to citizenship helped cost him his front-runner status.

Romney, despite facing criticism about some of his own immigration policies in Massachusetts and the fact that he was forced to dismiss a company that tended his lawn after it was revealed that it employed illegal immigrants, has attacked all of his rivals on the issue. A new CNN poll shows Romney with sizable advantages over the competition on the handling of illegal immigration, with a lead of 17 percentage points over Huckabee on the matter.

"You have a strong field, but their strengths and weaknesses cancel each other out. No one candidate is standing out as particularly stronger than the rest of the field or more conservative than the rest of the field," said Ken Mehlman, President Bush's former campaign manager, who spent years courting Latino voters for the Republican cause. "And in that dynamic, the desire is to stand up on every issue and say, 'I'm the strongest, and I'm the most conservative.' "

And nowhere is that more obvious than in the debate over immigration, he said.

The strategy poses a real risk. As the rhetoric and the policy proposals have grown increasingly strident, the eventual nominee's ability to win Latino support in swing states such as Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico may be coming increasingly into question.

"For Republican primary politics, this may be the most significant issue. Clearly, there is a segment that is hotly anti-immigrant, and they're very engaged," said Cecilia Mu¿oz, senior vice president for public policy at the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino political organization. "But I don't understand what these guys are going to say to my community when it's time to run" a general-election campaign.

But if Republicans can focus the debate on law-breaking, border security and the strain that illegal immigrants are placing on public services, the issue could also place a wedge between many Democrats and their eventual nominee.

Less than a year after Bush resumed his push to offer the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, most of his would-be GOP successors could not have moved further from his platform. Even McCain now embraces policies to clamp down on employers and to seal the border with fencing, unmanned aerial vehicles and beefed-up border patrols. Only when the border is certified as closed would he then consider what to do with the illegal immigrants already in the country.

Huckabee's "Secure America" plan twins a similar crackdown with a proposal to give all illegal immigrants 120 days to register with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and to leave the country. Those who register would face no penalty if they later applied to immigrate or visit. Those who do not "will be, when caught, barred from future reentry" for a decade, Huckabee's plan states.

Huckabee proved so mindful of the issue that he used last week's assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto to argue for stronger border controls, "to make sure if there's any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country."

Romney would cut federal funds to any city that refuses to comply with federal immigration laws or to cooperate with a crackdown. Giuliani would issue all noncitizen workers and students a single, tamper-proof biometric identity card and create a single database to track all noncitizens in the country.

Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who joined the presidential campaign solely to pursue his hard-line agenda on illegal immigration, was so comfortable with the direction that his fellow GOP candidates were taking that he dropped out of the race last month and pronounced the field "Tancredo-ized."

Since Bush's first-term push for immigration reform, the political environment has changed dramatically, in large part because the geography of immigration has changed. It is no longer solely a border-state concern. States such as Iowa and New Hampshire have recently experienced their first real influxes of immigrant communities in decades.

"This is the most volatile issue I have measured since busing in 1972," said Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster. "It's not like abortion or gay rights, which may touch some people or offend the moral values of some. This is something that affects everyone."

Hart compared the issue of immigration to the treaty returning to Panama the Panama Canal, which drew a visceral response in conservative circles and turned President Gerald R. Ford's GOP nomination campaign in 1976 from a cakewalk to a dogfight.

"It's been like boiling water," said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party chairman and a co-chairman of Romney's campaign in the state. "It's an issue that was in the back of Americans' minds that needed to get fixed. It wasn't a priority until numbers got out of hand. Then Congress took it up, put it on the front burner, and when nothing got done, the voters turned exasperated. Can we live with such a significant breaking of the rule of law and not be morally outraged?"

Latino and other minority groups see racial codes in many of the words the Republican candidates have used -- for instance, "illegals" rather than "illegal immigrants." And hovering around the campaigns are far more strident figures and organizations. Immigration groups were taken aback when Huckabee accepted the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the border-security Minuteman Project, calling it "providential."

Mothers Against Illegal Aliens recently posted a plea for people to bring their own sheets and utensils to hotels and restaurants because "the person who cooked your meal or made your bed may very well be the one who picked your fruit and vegetables," suggesting that immigrants are spreading disease.

"We as a community are under attack," Mu¿oz said.

Its members have pledged to fight back. A coordinated campaign, by Latino political groups, service unions, Spanish-language television and radio stations and print-media outlets helped entice more than 1 million immigrants to apply for citizenship through October, said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund. The campaign is now shifting to voter registration and education.

"I think many folks underestimate how sophisticated immigrants and immigrant voters are," Vargas said. "People are seeing participation in the political arena as an act of self-defense."

Officials in most of the Republican campaigns say they are not worried. Their candidates have distinguished between their opposition to illegal immigration and their support for legal immigration. And all voters share concerns about security and the rule of law, said Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for the Giuliani campaign.

But other Republicans are not as sanguine. Mehlman warned that without a concerted effort to woo back the Latino voters the campaigns have turned off, the GOP may be in trouble. "Is there a basic concern?" he asked. "The answer is 'yes.' "

Polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.

http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/ksm/lowres/ksmn1276l.jpg

The Pinocchio Factor: Huckabee and the Arkansas DREAMERS

Huckabee is denying that he endorsed scholarships for DREAMERS as governor of Arkansas. He had been looking like a more humane human being than most of his rivals, but unfortunately, he has decided to join the pack. His nose is growing by the minute.

Even so, at the moment, there is no way he can beat Giuliani or Romney, whose noses are so long they could be used as bridges from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

The GOP in general must think that the American voter is either blind or totally stupid. This type of attitude will bring drastic consequences at the end of the campaign season.

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A Tuition Deal For Immigrants?
Tuesday, December 18, 2007; A04
Washington Post

Now that he has become a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee is feeling the heat from other Republican candidates, who are scrutinizing his record as governor of Arkansas for evidence of "liberal" or "Democratic" inclinations. One leading rival, Fred D. Thompson, has accused Huckabee of having "championed" an effort to permit illegal immigrants to benefit from in-state tuition rates at state universities. Huckabee has denied the charge, saying that his support was limited to a much more restrictive scholarship program.

Huckabee's denials fly in the face of the record.

THE FACTS
During his annual State of the State address to the Arkansas legislature in January 2005, Huckabee proposed making "any student graduating from a high school in Arkansas" eligible for state financial aid. He said it was "terribly unjust" to deny such aid solely on the basis of a student's immigration status, "a status that he had no decision in and no control over."

"Huckabee plan would aid illegal aliens," the state's leading newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reported the following day.

The wording of the governor's proposal was a little vague. A Democratic state legislator, Joyce Elliott, had already proposed legislation granting in-state tuition status to undocumented immigrants. During talks with the governor's staff, Elliott agreed to include a scholarship provision in her bill, which became known as House Bill 1525. She says both parts of the bill were fully supported by Huckabee. "I never had the slightest indication that he wanted any changes," Elliott, who no longer serves in the legislature, said. "He clearly supported the entire bill, and I never heard anything different from them."

Huckabee defended the bill in conversations with reporters and expressed disappointment when the measure failed to pass the Arkansas Senate by two votes. "I don't understand the opposition to it, I just honestly don't," he said, according to an April 14, 2005, Associated Press report. "It hurts me on a personal as well as a policy level to think that we are still debating issues that I kind of hoped we had put aside in the 1960s."

Asked about the measure during the Nov. 28 CNN-YouTube debate, Huckabee said his proposal applied to students who had been in Arkansas schools from the time they were "5 or 6 years old" and were "A-plus" students, "drug and alcohol free," and in the process of "applying for citizenship." He implied that his support was limited to these students, a point reiterated by his spokeswoman Kirsten Fedewa.

"He did not support in-state tuition," Fedewa said in an e-mail. "He supported scholarships for students who qualified."

THE PINOCCHIO TEST
The distinction that Huckabee is attempting to draw is an artificial one. His original State of the State address talked about making all Arkansas high school graduates eligible for state financial aid, not just A-plus students applying for citizenship. Huckabee was particularly interested in the scholarship part of the bill. But it is untrue to claim that he did not support in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Three Pinocchios.

ONE PINOCCHIO: Some shading of the facts.
TWO PINOCCHIOS: Significant omissions or exaggerations.
THREE PINOCCHIOS: Significant factual errors.
FOUR PINOCCHIOS: Real whoppers.
THE GEPPETTO CHECK MARK: Statements and claims contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

article and small pinocchios: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/17/AR2007121702098.html

photo of large pinocchio: http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3517105/2/istockphoto_3517105_pinocchio_superliar.jpg

McCain and Huckabee Look Like Real People

As I've mentioned before, McCain and Huckabee are the only ones from the GOP Presidential Race that don't scare me. I am especially impressed with Huckabee's treatment of in-state tuition. Even so, I think having another Republican in the oval office would not be reassuring for the nation.

McCain and Huckabee would be a good choice for the GOP presidential ticket. But I guess in this campaign you are only ahead if you were expelled from diplomacy school. Unfortunately, our political culture seems to go for bad ethics and combative people with few diplomatic skills. As David Brooks mentioned recently on a TV news program. The American voter seems to like someone that is a "tough guy." (Hillary is actually a tough guy too).

Principles Amid the GOP Pack
By David S. Broder
Sunday, December 2, 2007; B07

If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009, it's pretty clear what it would do. It would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president -- and president-in-waiting.

Those two are far from front-runners. They trail Mitt Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire and lag behind Rudy Giuliani in national surveys of Republican voters. But, in a series of debates, including last week's CNN-YouTube extravaganza, McCain and Huckabee have been notable for their clarity, character and, yes, simple humanity.

From everything I have heard on the campaign trail, it's obvious that they are the pair who have earned the widest respect among the eight Republican candidates themselves. McCain is the eldest and the most honored, not only for what he endured as a Vietnam prisoner of war but as a principled battler for what he considers essential on Iraq and other national security issues.

Huckabee, who previously was known only to those of us who cover state government and governors, has been the surprise discovery of the campaign season. His combination of religious principle, good humor, tolerance and clear passion on education and health care complements McCain's muscular foreign policy and aversion to wasteful domestic spending.

The two of them seem often to be operating on a different -- and higher -- plane than the quarrelsome Giuliani and Romney, whose mutual contempt is as palpable as it is persuasive.

Fred Thompson appears perpetually grumpy -- a presence hard to imagine inhabiting the Oval Office. The three House members -- Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter -- are exercising their lungs but running for exercise, happy to be part of the proceedings but with no hope of being nominated.

What sets McCain and Huckabee apart is most evident in the way they treat the contentious issue of illegal immigration. Both of them have been burned by it -- Huckabee in a losing battle with his legislature over tuition breaks for children of illegal immigrants; McCain for his sponsorship of President Bush's comprehensive immigration reform. Both now acknowledge -- as everyone must -- that the failure of the federal government to secure the southern border has produced broad public outrage.

But, unlike the others, who seem to take their rhetorical cues from the rabidly anti-immigrant Tancredo, Huckabee and McCain always remember that those who struggle to reach the United States across the deserts or rivers of the Southwest are human beings drawn here by the promise of better lives for their families.

After outlining the failed Senate effort to pass a bill that included a temporary guest worker program and a pathway to earned citizenship for the illegal immigrants already living here, McCain said, "What we've learned is that the American people want the borders enforced. We must . . . secure the borders first. But then . . . we need to sit down as Americans and recognize these are God's children as well, and they need some protections under the law and they need some of our love and compassion." That answer was interrupted by applause.

Huckabee was asked to defend a bill he sponsored that the questioner said "gave illegal aliens a discount for college in Arkansas by allowing them to pay lower in-state tuition rates."

The former governor corrected him. The bill, he said, "would have allowed those children who had been in our schools their entire school life the opportunity to have the same scholarship that their peers had, who had also gone to high school with them and sat in the same classrooms. . . . It wasn't about out-of-state tuition."

Romney was not appeased. He said Huckabee sounded like a Massachusetts liberal, giving the taxpayers' money to people who are here illegally.

To which Huckabee replied: "In all due respect, we're a better country than to punish children for what their parents did. We're a better country than that." He, too, was applauded.

I think we are that better country. And I hope the Republicans agree.

davidbroder@washpost.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113001788.html