Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Friday suggested that Hillary Clinton may be a stronger Democratic foe than members of his party are expecting.
“I think Republicans underestimate what it’s going to be like to face the Clintons in the election,” Huckabee said during an appearance on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom.”
{mosads}In speeches throughout this campaign season, Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, has argued that he is the only Republican candidate “who has consistently challenged the Clintons, defeated the Clinton machine and lived to tell about it.”
Top Republicans, including months-long front-runner Donald Trump and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, suggested earlier this week — after Vice President Biden dropped out and before Clinton’s hearing Thursday on the 2012 Benghazi attacks — that the former first lady would be easier to defeat than Biden.
But Huckabee said on Friday of Clinton’s testimony, “I think that politically Hillary survived, because it was all about doing what the Clintons are great at doing: they first deny, then they deceive, then they distract and ultimately what they do is they just go ahead and delay.”
Huckabee noted that Republicans on the committee asked “pointed” questions of Clinton, but acknowledged, “I’m not sure a lot of Americans are that tuned in.”
The former secretary of State testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, but most of the sparks that flew during the day-long hearing were between committee members.
Clinton was welcomed by an enthusiastic crowd of Democrats at an event Friday morning after escaping largely unscathed from a marathon hearing on Capitol Hill the previous day.