Huckabee flips on smoking

All of the candidates have flipped on earlier positions that they've taken. The Republicans are particularly egregious in this respect as each candidate has tried to tailor his positions to suit the conservatives voting in the GOP primaries. Now Mike Huckabee is trying to walk back assertive statements he made just a few months ago that, as president, he would push Congress to pass a federal ban on smoking in public places.

At an August 2007 forum on cancer hosted by cyclist and activist Lance Armstrong and moderated by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Huckabee said he supported a federal smoking ban.

“If you are president in 2009 and Congress brings you a bill to outlaw smoking nationwide in public places, would you sign it?” Matthews asked.

“I would, certainly would. In fact, I would, just like I did as governor of Arkansas, I think there should be no smoking in any indoor area where people have to work,” Huckabee responded, triggering applause from the crowd. Part of the interview has been posted on Youtube.com and viewed over 2,500 times.

Calling it a “workplace safety issue,” Huckabee added that the “same reason that we regulate that you can’t pour radon gas into a workplace is the same reason that we shouldn’t allow people to pour the toxic, noxious fumes of a cigarette into a place where people have to work.”

But conservatives don't like the idea of expanding the nanny impulses of the states to the federal governmnet. And so now Huckabee is trying to wiggle out of his previous statement by pretending he would just be signing the bill because Congress passed it.

Huckabee’s campaign, however, is backtracking. In its statement to The Hill, the campaign stated, “At a Lance Armstrong cancer forum last August, Governor Huckabee said that if Congress presented him with legislation banning smoking in public places, he would sign it, because he would not oppose the overwhelming public support that such a congressional vote would reflect. However, since such sentiment for federal legislation doesn’t exist at this time, and since he has said that the responsibility for regulating smoking initially lies with the states, the governor believes that this issue is best addressed at the local and state levels.”

I guess that means that a president would never veto any bill to arrive at his desk because its very existence would reflect "overwhelming public support." Is Huckabee saying that he regards the president as just a rubber stamp for what the people's representatives have voted for. And back in August, Huckabee was touting his role in leading Congress to pass such a ban.

But at that same August event, Huckabee sought to take the lion’s share of the credit for the Arkansas law and argued that such an initiative would not be possible without the involvement of the executive.

“As a governor, I led our state to become the first state in the South to have a statewide ban on smoking anywhere indoors and I’m proud of that and it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to get done,” Huckabee said. “It was hard.

And I’ll tell you something, Chris, it takes the personal involvement of the chief executive to make that happen,” he said.

PErsonally, I'm not a smoker and appreciate not having smoking allowed in public places. But I can't stand this tendency to think that, if something is good, the federal government must be responsible for it. Let the states and local municipalities pass such regulations. If Huckabee has now realized that importance of federalism, that's a good thing. But his original impulse tells us a lot about his approach to governing.