Mike Huckabee Making Life Difficult For John McCain

While most people have all but handed John McCain the Republican presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee isn’t about to give up without a fight. Huckabee is trailing McCain in total delegates by a wide margin. McCain has 723 to Huckabee’s 217 according, to the latest CNN numbers. Those numbers do not include Louisiana’s delegates, where Huckabee came in first, and Washington state, where Huckabee finished second to McCain.

To show how committed Huckabee is to this race, and how prepared he is to make things difficult for the McCain campaign, Huckabee is looking at possible legal issues surrounding the Washington State caucus and is disputing the results, according to the Washington Post. It appears Huckabee is going to fight tooth and nail until the end on this campaign.

While the chances of Huckabee becoming the Republican nominee are unlikely, he is certainly doing his best to thwart McCain’s presidential hopes. One of the biggest hurdles ahead for McCain is his lack of funding. He has had a hard time raising funds and would love nothing more than to save as much money as possible for the battle for the presidency against the winner of the Democratic race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The fact that McCain has to continue fighting Huckabee off is costing him more and more of his precious funding.

The following excerpt from the Washington Post pretty much sums up what most people think of Huckabee’s chances:

“Karl Rove, President Bush's former senior political adviser, did his best to shoot down Huckabee's chances. Rove said on CBS that it is far-fetched to presume that McCain will say or do something to doom his candidacy.

Huckabee ‘said he could win, provided that there were mistakes made by his opponent, and that some of these bound or pledged delegates would change their mind. Well, even if they change their mind, they're bound or pledged to vote for the candidate who won their primary,’ Rove said. ‘I find it very unlikely, completely implausible, that Governor Huckabee could win 83 percent of the delegates.’”

It should also be added that Rove is backing McCain for the nomination, so his views could be biased. Rove's viewpoint is also generally held by most other observers outside of the Huckabee camp, though.