Dick Armey

If there is one word that can best describe Mike Huckabee's response to losing the Republican primary to John McCain after being savaged by the fiscal conservatives and snubbed by the social conservatives, it would be "bitterness."

As we've noted a few times before, for a guy who is presumably planning on making another run for the White House in 2012, Huckabee seems to be spending a lot more time settling scores with those who refused to back him than attempting to win them over ahead of his next campaign, which doesn't seem like a particularly smart political strategy.

And here he is yet again, calling out FreedomWorks' Dick Armey for mocking Huckabee's anti-Wall Street message when he was running for office while now trying capitalize on the right-wing "tea party" opposition to the bailouts and stimulus package and whatever else all those protests were supposedly about: 

"The tea parties are mostly an honest spontaneous effort by ordinary people from all over the political spectrum to express their outrage at government hubris from absurd spending, corporate bailouts, etc.," former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told ABC News in an email today, asked for a comment about today's protests.

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Now, of course, Armey and FreedomWorks are rallying the tea party protests around the country that are protesting big government, Wall Street bailouts, higher taxes and President Obama's housing plan.

"As for Armey," Huckabee writes when I ask him to weigh in, "he and about 75% of the so-called 'conservatives' owe me a big apology. They misrepresented my record, took my statements totally out of context, and accused me of economic liberalism, which is utter nonsense. My campaign upset their orderly apple cart, because it really was run by grass-roots conservatives and small business owners and not those who as it turned out were wholly owned subsidiaries of recklessly run corporations and lobbyists.”

Huckabee says Armey and his cohorts "never listened to what I was saying, but just spoke out to protect their pals who were funding their faces—there’s a word for people who get to paid to show love, but polite people don’t use it openly. I’ve found it amazing to watch the huffy puffy types who skinned me alive during the campaign jump out and support TARP, and then change their tune when Obama and the Dems proposed stimulus.

We'll try and be polite here as well and not mention the word that Huckabee obviously has in mind.

When he was running for the nomination, there were lots of articles quoting sources familiar with Huckabee's tenure in Arkansas that remarked on his petty vindictiveness and willingness to hold a grudge.  Those tales never worked their way into the narrative around his campaign as they couldn't overcome his media-driven reputation as a "aw shucks" bass-playing everyman ... but it sure seems as if Huckabee is doing everything he can to make sure that it becomes a theme in his next potential campaign.

Just last week we were fondly reminiscing about the battle that raged for several weeks back in 2006 between Dick Armey and James Dobson that, in many ways, embodied the tensions that existed, and continue to exist, between the economic and social conservative wings of the Republican base.

While that particular clash eventually subsided, the underlying issues did not go away and they seem to have resurfaced in recent weeks, again thanks to Armey's seemingly unprovoked attack on the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins over the latter's suggestion that John McCain ought to announce that he will appoint a "family czar" in order to appease the so-called "Values Voters" FRC and the like claim to represent.

Not surprisingly, Armey thinks the idea is idiotic and is not shy about saying so:

Think about that for a moment: A federal bureaucrat to oversee families. I'm sure Perkins would find a way to claim he's just there to give America's families a helping hand, that he's promoting our country's precious faith and values. But as Ronald Reagan said, the most frightening words in the English language are, "I'm from the government. I'm here to help." If there's anything our families don't need, it is Washington mucking around in their lives. Could anyone imagine a less conservative idea?

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There are all sorts of problems with Perkins' notion, but the biggest one right now is that no one even knows for sure what a family czar would actually do.  Every time Perkins has brought it up, he's brushed quickly over the topic, as if he doesn't want to discuss what it means. That's probably because it is a political stunt and not a serious policy idea.

Armey goes on to basically say that Perkins and his allies are power hungry and that he’s not even sure that Perkins ought to be claiming to be a conservative and cites Perkins’ support of Mike Huckabee as evidence:

[Perkins threw] his support behind Mike Huckabee, a candidate whose conservative credentials were anything but solid. By supporting a politician who governed in large part by taxing, regulating, and moralizing, he made his own declarations of conservatism subject to doubt.

It is not everyday that we come to the defense of Tony Perkins but in this case, it is simply untrue that Perkins ever supported Huckabee.  In fact, Perkins’ repeatedly pledged neutrality on the GOP primary race, though there was plenty of speculation that he preferred Mitt Romney, and his failure to back Huckabee was a constant source of irritation to the Huckabee campaign.

For his part, Perkins himself doesn’t seem particularly fazed by Armey’s attack, dismissing him as “grumpy” and saying that Armey’s “disregard for the importance of strong families is shocking.”    

It is safe to say that the relationship between Armey and the Religious Right has undergone something of a transformation since he left office.  His relationship with the FRC seems especially strained and it is difficult to imagine that they’ll ever be able to get back to the good old days when Armey “met with us every single week. His staff is available to us when we go there, so it has been a close relationship. Over the years he has been the defender of the family."

Mike Huckabee’s first-place finish in the Iowa Republican caucus was a victory for the Religious Right, after the combined efforts of a number of lesser-known right-wing figures eager to nominate one of their own. But while James Dobson and Richard Land issued cautious statements endorsing the victory if not the candidate, other national religious-right activists remained aloof, maintaining that Huckabee jeopardizes the vaunted right-wing coalition by alienating some of its partners, especially allies on the economic Right.

“I'm still skeptical that Mike Huckabee is the right man to speak for them because of his views on economics and foreign policy,” said Gary Bauer. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said Huckabee supporters “overlooked the fact he was not attractive to other members of the conservative coalition, and they said they don't care about us, and we don't care about them."

Indeed, these prominent religious-right activists are echoing people like Patrick Toomey of the Club for Growth, who called Huckabee the “John Edwards of the Republican Party,” FreedomWorks' Dick Armey ("Huckabee undermines the GOP's longstanding unity between its traditional and economic wings"), or American Enterprise Institute Vice President Harry Olsen. Toomey’s Club has done the most to convince Republicans of Huckabee’s alleged tax-hiking heresy, running anti-Huckabee ads heavily in Iowa since the summer.

Huckabee himself has played up this reputation as a populist, deriding the “Club for Greed” and talking about “the growing angst in the middle class.”

While many pundits seem to have accepted this presentation, it’s important to separate style from substance: When it comes to economic policy, Huckabee has arguably been running to the right of any of his major opponents.

Also appearing at ALEC next week: Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Miss America.