GOP candidate Mike Huckabee said Monday that he does not agree with critics who say Bill Clinton will be a liability for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, saying that even Republicans would pick the former president after seven years of President Barack Obama.
"He's immensely popular with Democrats, and that's what this process is right now," the former Arkansas governor told
Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program.
"He's still popular with a lot of Americans. Frankly, after seven years of Obama, a lot of Republicans would take Bill Clinton back, warts and all, just because at least he understood how to govern. He was not the kind of person who utterly demonized the other side legislatively."
Clinton is partisan, as most people are, Huckabee continued, "but he also had a history, and I think it was the fact he'd been a long-term governor and understood how to govern."
But still, while Republican Newt Gingrich was speaker of the House, Clinton worked with him to get welfare reform and "other pieces of legislation that were good for the country, and I think there are a lot of people that miss that functional government, which we don't have now."
However, he said he does think it's fair that Donald Trump has been attacking Clinton on his record, as the Clintons do have "some vulnerability here" that Trump is seizing upon.
He also does not think Trump's attacks will backfire on him, as nothing has backfired on him yet.
"He's played the whole media game like a kid on Christmas morning with a toy drum," said Huckabee. "He's beating the heck out of them and I honestly don't think that this is going to hurt Donald Trump."
Also on Monday's show, Huckabee disagreed with Trump on
opposing Virginia's decision to require its voters to sign an oath that they are members of the Republican Party before voting in the primary.
"Each state has different criteria," Huckabee said. "If there's a registration for different party, people should be able to register a week before or a month before. I wouldn't try to tell Virginia what they need to do in the commonwealth, but I do think it's perfectly legitimate in a primary to tell people you need to register with our party if you want to help pick our nominee, because this is not a general election.
"This is a party process. The parties are picking their candidate to go against the other guy and I think to say that there's got to be a registration, I don't have a problem with that. I'd have a problem with it in a general election but not in a primary."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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