Huckabee Weighing 2012 Presidential Bid

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Thursday running for president in 2012 was "very much an option."

Although President Obama would be a tough competitor, changes in the electoral map mean that the president “can be beaten,” Huckabee told reporters at a Feb 24 Newsmaker event at the National Press Club.

To gauge support for his candidacy, Huckabee is touring with his new book, A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need from Washington (and a Trillion That We Don’t!). In it, Huckabee, a Fox News commentator, describes the family is the basic unit of government. He advocates for heterosexual parents to achieve high school educations, stay married to each other, keep steady jobs, and eat together most nights as a family. “Wake up and smell the dinner table,” Huckabee said.

Outside the home, Huckabee envisions government that is “as local as possible and as limited as possible.” He described federal money for popular programs that governors could not sustain as “like a free sample of heroin drug dealers give away.”

While praising President Obama for being a role model as an excellent husband and extraordinary father, Huckabee criticized the president’s foreign policy as “apologize and throw away the stick.” Hucakbee also said Obama’s recent refusal to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, restricting marriage to between a man and a woman, demonstrated that the president was out of touch with voters in the states.

Huckabee declined to comment personally on potential Republican challengers for the 2012 nomination.

-- Kelly Nuxoll