Posted on 11/01/2007 12:31:30 PM PDT by dano1
Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and a Republican presidential hopeful. He served as governor for 11 years. He is an ordained Southern Baptist minister. The governor filed his candidacy papers for the New Hampshire primary on Thursday, Oct. 18.
Q:If you could do one thing as president, what’s that one thing you do?
Bring this country back together. And by that I mean ... try to provide the sort of leadership that makes people again love being an American more than being a Democrat or Republican. First and foremost there are some things we need to solve as a country and we can’t do that as long as we are divided. We have to do that as a United States of America, a united people of America.
You spoke recently at the Cool Air Cool Planet conference. At one point you said, “I’m running for president, not for genius.” What do you mean by that?
The president provides leadership to the country and gives it direction in the same way that the airline pilot flies the plane and gives it direction, but he may not be able to go up under it, and it’s not even necessary that he’s able to fix the hydraulic system in the tail of the airplane. He just has to know who can and how to get that person on board as quickly as possible to get it done. I think that’s what a person who’s going to be president has to do: surround yourself with people who have talents you don’t have and know things you don’t know.
At the conference, a couple of times you said, I just want the easy questions. No more hard questions. Were you comfortable up there?
I was at home and comfortable. I’ve never been in a situation that I felt like I was beyond my capacity to be in the middle of. Obviously, I knew that the audience was a little left of center. And I doubt that there was a big huge delegation of Republicans sitting out there. But I thought this is an issue that needed to be addressed from those of us from a conservative perspective. There are certain things we are going to agree on. I’m not an environmentalist, but I am a conservationist. I think it’s important, on the points that we agree, that we do need to take better care of our planet because we’ve got to turn it over to the next generation, and hopefully we haven’t abused it and worn it out and done things that do irreparable damage.
Those terms are separate?
Environmentalist and conservationist? In some ways to me they are. As a conservationist, I believe we should be able to use the resources, we just can’t abuse them, and we need to make sure that we leave them in good or better shape for the next generation. When I think of an environmentalist, and it may not be this way for everybody who identifies himself as one, but sometimes it [seems] like, don’t use anything, let’s just leave it completely alone. I don’t think that’s completely realistic. We ought to use the resources of the Earth to advance our civilization, to advance our lifestyles, as long we do it with a sense of responsibility and that we use rather than abuse the elements of our planet.
You recently played on stage with local rocker Mama Kicks?
Mama Kicks plays a lot of classic rock, similar to what my band [Capitol Offense] plays. I had a blast. I played for about an hour. I didn’t want to quit. I would have played all night, but I had to get home and get a few hours of sleep before the next day which was another brutal and tough day. They’re a great band. Lisa Guyer, who’s kind of the front of the band, and plays guitar and sings, is just a phenomenal talent. In fact we’re flying her and Barry Goudreau, former lead player for Boston, out to Iowa to play with my band next Friday night at the Surf Ballroom, where Buddy Holly played his last show.
Is that how you relax, playing music?
My hobbies are hunting, fishing, running and playing guitar in my band. Those are the things I do for relaxation and therapy and to keep sane. One of my major themes as a governor and [as] a presidential candidate is to promote the value and importance of music and art education, and I really feel like that we’ve done a great disservice to students of America by cutting funding for music and art programs at a time when we really need to be beefing up those programs because it helps stimulate the creative side of a student. The future economy of in this country is going to be a creative economy, and you’re hardly going to help create the generation that can be competitive in a creative economy if you cut creativity out of the curriculum. People ... my age ... aren’t playing tackle football anymore, but they are still making music, they can still act in community theater, they can still draw and paint and be participants in the arts. It’s not something we ever outgrow. It’s not something that we get to the place where we can’t do anymore. And if we have some type of debilitating illness where we can’t sing, dance, play, we can still enjoy. It’s such an integral part of our lives. Our culture is literally transmitted from one generation to the next by way of the arts. If you destroy that, you destroy more than just the immediate value of the aesthetic worth of the arts, you’ve really destroyed the vehicle that translates your civilization and culture to the next generation.
You’re passionate about this.
Very passionate. I think our educational system is completely flawed because we’re putting incredible focus on left-brain development, which is fine to recognize we need math and science and we need logical skills in a student. But we have 6,000 kids every day drop out of school. That’s 30 percent of American students who never finish. Part of reason is a lot of kids are right-brain dominant. And if you have a curriculum that completely ignores their educational capacity as right-brain dominant, you have left a lot of students behind, which is what we’re doing. No educational system is complete if it’s one-dimensional.
How do you go about doing that? You don’t want to raise taxes. These programs are cut because of budgetary issues.
It’s about priorities. You don’t see many schools cutting their football or basketball programs, and I’m not saying they have too. But you may have to dial some of that back. One thing we did in Arkansas, we created a mandate curriculum that included music and art programs for every student, K through 12, by certified teachers. Until that time, schools always had a reason why they couldn’t ... do it. When you build it into the curriculum, it’s amazing that they can find away.
If you don’t take the number-one vote here, what’s victory for you in New Hampshire?
Any placement in the top three or four in New Hampshire is going to be a victory for us, but we’re not shooting for barely squeaking by. We think with some resources financially to get on air, to get our message out, and the kind of grassroots organization that we are continuing to build, we’re not giving up that we would be unable to win this thing. I know to a lot of people hearing that today they’ll say, you’ve got to be kidding. No, I’m really not because if we have two or three months to continue to get our message out there, I think we have a real shot to do it.
How do you go about doing that? You don’t want to raise taxes. These programs are cut because of budgetary issues.
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simple. just cut time from reading, math...the stuff that actually gets you a good paying job.
Yikes! This is an impressive amount of drivel.
Nanny-state freakzoid on steroids. Nelson Rockefeller would be proud.
Huckabee's nominated or selected as VP = 3rd party
Maybe he and Clinton ought to get together and form a band. Too bad Arsenio no longer has his show.
Yawn.
To the Paulites and Fredheads, the nomination of ANYONE besides RuPaul and FDT = 3rd Party.
You're kinda fun as the only freeper who supports both RuPaul and FDT. Most of the Paulites think Fred is a "globalist" and think the constitutional choice would be to clone Ron Paul. Most of the Fredheads think Paul is a "pro-life Dennis Kuninich" and only Fred himself is worthy of the oval office (well, maybe Duncan Hunter would be OKAY for VP if he does whatever Fred tells him to...)
In any case, you guys must be dying for a repeat of Pat Buchanan and his 0.4% of the popular vote (the Buchananites, BTW, were so unhinged they dismissed Dick Cheney's selection as a "RINO"). You purists are cute the way you're happy with getting an astrick level of support in exchange for having a candidate who agrees with you 100% of the time.
The funny thing is, the great Ronald Reagan selected far worse VPs, Senator Richard Schweiker in '76 and George H. Bush in 1980.
If you can't even stomach someone who agrees with you 90% of the time, you quacks should have been frothing demanding impeachment with the kind of "moderates" Reagan dug up. Huckabee looks like Jesse Helms compared to Schweiker.
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