Whenever Mike Huckabee gets asked whether he has any plans to make another run for the White House in 2012, his standard answer is that he's not really thinking about it at the moment as he is focusing on his TV program and various other activities.
So the Des Moines Register recently conducted a poll asking Iowans about possible 2012 candidates that did not include Huckabee ... and now Huckabee's close associates are complaining:
Mike Huckabee should still be included on the list of possible Republican presidential candidates, a close associate said Friday.
The former Arkansas governor, who won Iowa’s 2008 Republican caucuses, had indicated he probably would stay out of the 2012 race.
But Hogan Gidley, executive director of his political action committee, said that stance may be changing.
“You know, everybody has a bad day,” Gidley said about Huckabee’s earlier statements. “I would check his actions over the last 24 or 48 hours.”
Gidley later sent a statement from Huckabee saying no decision about his political future will be made until after the mid-term elections.
Gidley, who runs HuckPAC, contacted The Des Moines Register on Friday after the newspaper released an Iowa Poll showing the favorability ratings of possible Republican presidential candidates. The paper excluded Huckabee from the poll because the former Arkansas governor had said he probably wouldn’t run.
I, for one, am quite glad to hear this because I have spent a lot of time chronicling Huckabee's ties to the radical Religious Right fringe and I'd hate to see it all go to waste if he decided not to run.