Mitch Daniels is one smart pol, as is Mike Huckabee. Both foresee the electoral train wreck I visited earlier today: for Daniels that prospect has meant distancing himself from the far-right extremist crowd, and now comes Huckabee, sounding similarly sane.
Huckabee on Michelle Obama: "She's been criticized unfairly by a lot of my fellow conservatives."
Huckabee on the birther issue: It's an "obsession" and "waste of time."
Huckabee on Obama's religion and past association with Jeremiah Wright: "If people went back and heard every sermon I heard when I was a little kid and some of the more fundamentalist pastors were yelling from the pulpit at me, if they took every one of those sermons and lifted out of them certain phrases and things, it could be scandalous, but only out of the context of the bigger picture."
In another Politico piece, Huckabee is quoted as observing, in a direct and frontal assault on Palin, Bachmann & Bedlam Inc., "The people that are sitting around saying, '[Obama is] definitely going to be a one-term president. It’s going to be easy to take him out,' they’re obviously political illiterates – political idiots, let me be blunt."
Huckbee is too clever to be uncalculating. The first above-linked Politico story relates that "those who have known Huckabee for years say his rhetoric is less tactical than the former Arkansas governor simply being himself."
I'd grant him some degree of positive personality, yet on balance the thrust of his recent comments reveal -- for political cynics, which means anyone who follows politics -- a far heavier slant toward strategic thought.
It's fascinating to watch the GOP's smarter pols trying their damnedest to back away from GOP extremism.