Huckabee decides to pass on presidency bid

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Former Arkansas governor and 500-affiliate syndicated Citadel Media talker (“The Huckabee Report”) Mike Huckabee decided not to run for president in 2012 during his Fox News Channel (“Huckabee”) show 5/14. He said he would not seek the Republican nomination for president next year in an announcement that had been hotly anticipated: “All the factors say go, but my heart says no,” Huckabee said on his program. “And that’s the decision that I have made.”


If he had decided to make a run for the White House, Citadel was expected to use substitute hosts for his show.

As of Saturday afternoon, even some of his closest aides did not know what he would say. He kept them waiting as long as possible, making the announcement at the very end of his hour-long 8 p.m. program after interviewing guests including the “Extra” host Mario Lopez and the rock musician Ted Nugent.

Even during his statement, Huckabee hinted that perhaps he would run: “The past few weeks, the external signs and signals and answers to many of the obstacles point strongly toward running, [but] under the best of circumstances, being president is a job that takes one to the limit of his or her human capacity. For me to do it apart from an inner confidence that I was undertaking it with God’s full blessing is simply unthinkable.”

Huckabee had been showing strong poll numbers, among some of the strongest of his party’s possible contenders.