Running for public office is a "brutal process," GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Monday, and if fellow candidate Ben Carson believes he's being targeted now, he should know that matters will get much worse if he stays on top.
"If you run for offices, you're going to be put through the sausage grinder," the former Arkansas governor told
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. "I've written 12 books and I'm sure they've all been put under incredible scrutiny."
Carson complained this weekend that he's been undergoing extensive grilling, more than any other candidate, over statements made in his autobiography
"Gifted Hands," but Huckabee, a veteran presidential candidate, said the scrutiny has not really yet begun.
"I'm not going to get into arguing what Ben did and didn't do, but I think the one thing that I was taken aback [by what] he said was that people have been looking into his personal life," Huckabee said Monday.
"They have not yet gone into your family and they will . . . I've been through it for 26 years and life ain't fair, I'm telling you. But I will go on record today and tell you this, I never hit my mother with a hammer and I never stabbed anybody. Never wrote about it either. So there you go. At least I'm out there on the record for that."
Huckabee later in the morning told
Fox News' "America's Newsroom" that he even faced tough scrutiny in his home state of Arkansas eight years ago when he ran for president, and the current examinations are nothing.
"Tell me it's tough when they start going after your kids and nitpicking [over things that have] nothing to do with issues or your credibility or trust factor," he told Fox News. "It will happen and it's part of the process. There is nothing we'll do to stop that. The question is not will the press be tough on all the candidates, but the whole country will be."
But at the end of the day, when you write a book you have to answer for what's in it, he told Fox's Bill Hemmer.
"I have written 12 of them," he said. "I understand people will pick them apart and you better have your facts right. The voters will determine that. You have to be straightforward with people."
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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