Foreign Policy: Heilemann Horrified By Huckabee's Ivy League Lack

May 5th, 2015 6:42 PM

For all the good their Ivy League degrees did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—when you consider the smoking ruin that is their foreign policy record—you'd think John Heilemann would have the good sense not to make an Ancient Eight sheepskin the sine qua non for a presidential candidate.

But with his MSM elitism on full display, on today's With All Due Respect Heilemann had the chutzpah to suggest that Mike Huckabee doesn't clear the Commander-in-Chief bar because he lacks a degree from Harvard's Kennedy School or Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School.  Huck has simply picked up some foreign policy talking points from Fox News, huffed Heilemann.

The segment began with a clip from the foreign policy part of Huckabee's announcement speech.

MIKE HUCKABEE:  We put more pressure on our ally Israel to cease building bedrooms for their families in Judea and Samaria than we do on Iran for building a bomb. When I hear our current president say he wants Christians to get off their high horse so we can make nice with radical jihadists, I wonder -- I wonder if he can watch a western from the 50's and be able to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys really are? The ayatollahs of Iran will know that hell will freeze over before they get a nuclear weapon.

MARK HALPERIN: So foreign policy was not a particular strength of his last time. He took some heat on it when he ran in 2008. Does he have, with that kind of rhetoric, an ability to play in a foreign policy derby here?

JOHN HEILEMANN: Look, I don't think so, because I think in the end you have either his national security credentials are relatively weak. He's traveled around the world, he's gone to Israel some times, he's gone to Poland --

HALPERIN: Commander-in-Chief of the Arkansas National Guard --

HEILEMANN: -- National Guard, but he's -- that is pure Fox News rhetoric, basically. What he's done is not really gone to the foreign policy school at the [Harvard] Kennedy School of Government or at the [Princeton] Woodrow Wilson Institute --

HALPERIN: Or sat with George Schultz and Henry Kissinger --

HEILEMANN: -- or any of those folks. What he's done is basically, he's picked up a lot of talking points for being on Fox News. Will that excite some people in the base? I'm sure it will but I don't think it will meet the bar for Commander-in-Chief.