Every Democrat running for president thinks anti-illegal immigration activists are all racists and xenophobes. Do we really need a Republican nominee for president who thinks the same way?
Breakout GOP candidate Mike Huckabee, the soft-on-border control former governor of Arkansas, scored a jaw-dropping endorsement Tuesday from Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project. Despite a long gubernatorial record opposing employer sanctions and pushing tax-subsidized illegal alien education benefits, Huckabee won Gilchrist's support by unveiling a last-minute, tough-sounding homeland security plan.
Trouble is, Huckabee has downright and longstanding contempt for his new bedfellows of convenience.
Just two years ago, Huckabee appeared before the open-borders Hispanic group, The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), preaching an open-door policy. According to the Arkansas News Bureau, Huckabee also criticized state legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and enhanced reporting of illegal aliens as un-Christian, un-American, irresponsible and anti-life -- not to mention "inflammatory," "race-baiting" and "demagoguery."
Just last year, Huckabee lambasted opponents of the bipartisan shamnesty bill providing a mass pardon to illegal aliens as "driven by racism or nativism." He called strict immigration enforcement -- the kind he now supports -- "sheer folly" in his campaign-timed book released earlier this year. He actively invited the Mexican government to establish a consulate in Arkansas -- giving its office a $1 per year special office space rate -- so that its foreign officials could start dispensing security-undermining matricula consular ID cards to illegal aliens for banking and employment purposes. And he's not only for government in-state illegal alien discounts, he's for expanding them far beyond what the federal DREAM Act proposed.
But now that he needs to establish his border control bona fides, Huckabee is all honey. "Frankly, Jim," he said to the Minuteman Project founder at a press conference in Iowa on Tuesday, "I've got to tell you there were times in the early days of the Minutemen I thought, 'What are these guys doing, what are they about?' I confess I owe you an apology."
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