Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) took inspiration from an unlikely source in his speech to the religious Values Voters Friday evening: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
{mosads}Huckabee pointed to Clinton’s 2008 attack ad against now-President Obama featuring a ringing phone at 3:00 a.m. to argue that President Obama isn’t answering the call of the presidency.
“I think we know who we don’t want to answer it,” he said to laughs and claps from the crowd.
Huckabee went on to slam Obama’s foreign policy — and by extension, Clinton’s.
“On Sept. 11 two years ago the phone did ring and I guess it went to voicemail because when the desperate calls for help came from Benghazi, Libya, nobody answered that call,” he said. “And today the phone’s still ringing. The phone is ringing in Syria where ISIS has set up shop.”
He didn’t mention Clinton directly in the speech, but took shots at his fellow former Arkansas resident when asked beforehand by reporters. After calling her “tenacious” and saying she’d be “an incredibly formidable candidate,” he went after her on Benghazi.
“She’s got to go out and defend Barack Obama and her record in the first four years that she was Secretary of State which includes a rather unpleasant chapter in our foreign policy and an incident in Benghazi that has never been accounted for,” he said.
The former governor and presidential candidate, who’s mulling another run for the White House, showed off the oratorical skills he honed as a Baptist preacher and later on the campaign trail. He weaved in scripture references while addressing the heavily religious crowd and mixed in enough humor to feed them red-meat dinner.
Huckabee slammed the Internal Revenue Service as a “rogue criminal enterprise,” later joking that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) ran the Senate like a roach motel — “bills go in but they don’t come out.”
In bashing the National Security Agency, he joked that when he lost his iPhone he panicked until “I realized I didn’t have to worry about it, I called the NSA.”