NBC’s Chuck Todd made several attempts on Sunday to get presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to weigh in on whether or not South Carolina should remove the Confederate battle flag from the capitol grounds after the murder of nine black people at a church in Charleston last week.
“I still feel like it’s not an issue for a presidential candidate,” the former Arkansas governor responded.
Huckabee said that South Carolina has a female governor and an African-American senator, making it unfair to critcize the state for their flag. He complained about being “baited” with the question.
Todd pushed him to state his own position on the state sanctioning what “a large chunk of residents believe” is a symbol of racism, first raised at South Carolina’s state capitol in 1962 as a response to the civil rights movement.
“I don’t personally display it anywhere, so it’s not an issue for me,” Huckabee repeated. “That’s an issue for the people of South Carolina. Do you display it? I doubt it. Does anyone on your panel display it? I doubt it. For us, it’s not an issue.”
“If the state government of South Carolina wishes to address an issue in their state, that’s fine,” Huckabee said, but said a President would not have the authority to weigh in.
In 2008, Huckabee addressed the Confederate battle flag at a rally in South Carolina.
“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” Huckabee said.
“In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell ’em what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do,” he added.
