Huckabee warns against bloody Republican primary in 2016
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a potential White House contender, warned Saturday in the early-voting state of New Hampshire that Republicans should avoid a potentially bloody presidential primary process in 2016.
“We’re a nation of laws, not a nation just of personalities and brute political power. If you want four or eight more years of that, we can just sit back and have a big fight among the Republicans,” Huckabee said at the Republican Leadership Summit.
{mosads}”We can have a free-for-all, fratricide, demolition derby as has happened over the past few cycles, and the result will be we will have made the Democrats’ work quite easy for them,” he added.
To defeat presumed Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, Huckabee suggested everyone vying for the Republican presidential nomination stop acting like they want to be the “quarterback of the team.”
Instead, Huckabee suggested the best way to win “is to play the best game. To prove on the practice field that we, actually, can lead. And we have a history of doing it.”
He used an analogy of airline passengers selecting a pilot when preparing for tumultuous weather.
“You want it to be somebody who has flown through a lot of thunderstorms, not somebody who just got out of flight school,” Huckabee said.
Huckabee, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, said Friday he would announce whether he would run for president again May 5 in his hometown of Hope, Ark., describing its name as “symbolic.”
On Saturday, Huckabee reflected on the around two dozen likely presidential choices for Republican voters next year.
“I hope the decision is made based on who can play the game the best, not who can savage the other people who want the job. Because if that’s what happens to us, and we allow it, we will end up seeing our hopes dashed once again.”
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