Mike Huckabee enjoyed another round of pattycake from a national interviewer last night, this time Margaret Warner on the Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS. She asked one direct question, on whether he’d have vetoed the expansion of child health insurance, as Bush did. He dodged and she didn’t follow up (I put this same question to Huckabee campaign and have not received a response):
MIKE HUCKABEE: I think the president let that thing get way out of hand. It became a political issue. And a lot of Americans thought that the veto was that he was against coverage for kids.
He was proposing additional coverage under S-CHIP. What he didn’t propose was the expansion that would take it to even couples making $80,000 a year would be moved from private insurance that they already had to government insurance. I think the president’s concern — and it’s an understandable one — is that, if you move more people to a government system away from a private-based system, you’re only exacerbating what is the underlying problem.
Democrats have to be given credit. They did a great job of politically making this about kids when it was a little more complicated than that.