Mike Huckabee used the volatile situation in Pakistan on Friday to make an argument for building a fence on the U.S. border with Mexico and found himself trying to explain a series of remarks about Pakistanis and their nation.
“When I say single them out I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he said. “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.”
I have a Campaigns and Elections cover story on Huckabee coming out in a week, and so I’ve spent more time than I care to recount slogging through his schlocky oeuvre. If you can get past all the dieting tips and self-congratulatory stories of scrappy-underdog-makes-good, past the narcissism and the naiveté, Huckabee emerges as a relatively consistent Christian universalist. Casting all foreigners as terrorists bent on destroying Oklahoma strip malls is admirably difficult for him–even Pakistanis, after all, are God’s children. I assume this (along with a limited grasp of foreign policy in general) is why he sounds so ridiculously forced when he talks border walls and “illegals.” He doesn’t know how to frame nativist sentiment for the Tancredo types.
You see a similar impulse in his progressive take on criminal justice (read Radley Balko’s exceptional post on DuMond), which leads me to believe a Huckabee tough-on-crime speech is going to be just as painful. The problem with all this lovely universalism is that it comes packaged with a certain moral utopianism, and I’d really rather we didn’t put yet another moral utopian in command of the most powerful military in the history of the universe.