On the brink of a scheduled announcement of his 2016 plans, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Friday released a video hinting at core themes of his possible presidential run.
The video comes ahead of a Tuesday announcement in his hometown of Hope.
Huckabee touts his experience as governor of “Bill Clinton’s Arkansas,” when he faced strong opposition from Democrats. “You had all of the apparatus of the Democratic party aligned against Mike Huckabee,” longtime Huckabee aide Rex Nelson said in the video over a clip montage of Huckabee and the Clintons.
“Every day of my life in politics was a fight and sometimes it was an intense one,” Huckabee said in the video. “Any drunken redneck can walk into a bar and start a fight; a leader only starts a fight that he’s prepared to finish.”
He hits on a routine theme of his — the cultural divide between big power centers like Washington and areas of America where he believes typical citizens live. “One thing that has to happen in America is moving the power away from Washington, where people are so disconnected from the way that so many ordinary Americans live,” Huckabee said in the video.
Huckabee wraps up the video saying he’ll “lead with moral clarity in a dangerous world” and outlines some broad policy ideas, including protecting Social Security and Medicare, localizing power and keeping “all the options on the table in order to defeat the evil forces of radical Islam.”
“We believe in some things, we stand by those things, we live or die by those things,” he said in the video. “Let’s win the fight for what matters most.”
