Endorsement

I'm surprised it has taken this long for news of Huckabee's endorsement of Rep. Young  to be dissected and critiqued across the rightosphere. It caused quite a stir in our own neck of the woods last week.

We're still not happy about the endorsement, but can uderstand and even 'appreciate' why it was given.

This was Mike's response when we expressed our deep concern about the endorsement over on the huckpac blog.

I have been following the comments regarding Don Young today with interest. Your opinions are important to me and our team, so having read another comment just now asking for an explanation of our endorsement, I wanted to make sure you heard from me directly. 

Don Young has been a consistent pro-family, pro-life vote in the Congress. Don also endorsed my campaign and stood by me in the public arena defending my record from false attacks when other members of Congress wouldn't be seen with me. I don't expect everyone to agree with each endorsement we make. I am thankful that we are able to talk about our differences openly and respectfully (emphasis mine) 

McCain and Obama both this season have repeatedly thrown friends, supporters and endorsers under the bus when it became politically expedient to do so in facing the heat of controversy.

Mike Huckabee is very politically astute, he knows, given the challenges that were posed to his record during the campaign, that going on the record with support of Young would be the equivelent of shooting himself in the foot.

He knew that he may even lose supporters or disillusion some of his base in making the choice.

BUT.. he also knew that stabbing a faithful supporter in the back, (especially one who took a chance advocating with congressmen on his behalf during the campaign) , was never going to be an option he could exercise in good conscience.

Mike Huckabee has always advised his supporters, " Never sacrifice your principles for anybody's politics"  With this risky endorsement, Huckabee proved to us that he is a man of integrity who keeps his word. Politically, the most benificial thing he could have done was stay neutral, but he chose to do the hard thing.

Mike's supporters, contrary to popular belief, do not believe in the type of big government that Young represents, so we are not going to flock to embrace his candidacy. In the end, this endorsement will net Young few votes that he does not already have. But we can appreciate the character of a politician making a difficult choice.

Mike will probably be savaged for this... I hope having a clean conscience is worth it.

In the end, we his base of support are not worried that this endorsement may reflect on Mike's own fiscal policy stances. His Pac has endorsed GOP candidates to this point who have satisfied our preferences for fiscal and social conservatism. This is considered an outlier endorsement, generated out of a unique set of circumstances.

If a pattern of questionable endorsements surfaces, then we will of course revisit the question of assessing Mike's judgement and what it may mean regarding future support.

For now, he has earned the benifit of the doubt.

One of the things that we hope to address at The Next Right is how to integrate all the excitement from the grassroots organizations from the Presidential primary. Last week, the energy behind Mike Huckabee's campaign in South Carolina resulted in Glenn McCall's election as South Carolina Republican National Commtiteeman.

Tomorrow, the editors of The Next Right will be casting our three votes for Amit Singh in the Republican Primary in VA-08. The grassroots energy behind Singh is a combination of Ron Paul supporters and NoVA Indian-Americans.

Our endorsement of Singh focuses on several issues:

• He has a real grassroots core.
• He is dedicated to small government. This is beyond question in a Ron Paul supporter.
• His position on the Iraq war is reasonably solid. More on this below.
• While we don't think that he would be likely to win a general against Jim Moran, clearly an embarassment to Congress and Northern Virginia, we believe that he can attract activists and support for the whole GOP ticket.
• Mark Ellmore's campaign has demonstrated a desperate dishonesty in the last couple of days that we find quite disturbing.

Read on after the jump.